Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A conversation with two prominent journalists and a Bush-Cheney campaign official about why, in what should be a Democratic year, Obama can't put McCain away.By Thomas Schaller

Aug. 11, 2008

The public is unhappy with the Iraq war. The economy is in dire straits. The president, a two-term Republican, is setting records for unpopularity. It's very difficult for one party to win three presidential elections in a row. Circumstances seem to be conspiring to make 2008 a Democratic year. So why is Barack Obama running neck and neck with John McCain two weeks before the Democratic Convention?

Salon asked two respected journalists and a veteran Republican operative to give us their best guesses. Tom Edsall, who was a Washington Post reporter for 25 years, is political editor of the Huffington Post. He has also been a professor of journalism at Columbia University since 2006. Mark Murray is the deputy political director for NBC News and was previously a reporter for the National Journal. He co-writes MSNBC's First Read, a roundup of national political news. Ben Ginsberg, a lawyer in the Washington firm Patton Boggs, served as counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in both 2000 and 2004 and played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount.

Tom Schaller: The conventional wisdom from left and right, Republicans and Democrats, is that this is going to be, or should be, a Democratic year. The president is unpopular. People are unhappy about the war. They're nervous about the economy. And yet, at least here in the pre-convention period, we find ourselves with a relatively tight race. Some polls show Obama with a slight, usually single-digit, lead; other polls show him leading within the margin of error or even tied with John McCain. To start the conversation today, do you all agree that in fact, Obama is running behind national party expectations and/or that McCain is running ahead of them?

Tom Edsall: I do agree, and he does have some problems he's going to have to deal with. He's got a problem with white working-class voters, including Democrats. Hillary's campaign still lingers on and the effect that she had on appealing specifically to those voters at his expense. He also has -- I've been in Pennsylvania just talking to voters, and there is not really -- a lot of people just don't know who he is or have a real connection to him. So I think he's got a ways to go.

Ben Ginsberg: I think Republicans are thrilled with how close the race remains. As you pointed out, the atmospherics in the country are not particularly friendly for Republicans this [election] cycle, and in terms of the way the campaign feels on a daily basis, perhaps exacerbated by the Obama tour of foreign ports of call, it doesn't feel particularly good. But the polls show the race really nip-and-tuck, with McCain in a position to win. I think that the Obama problems are ones that were first very evident among the Democratic primary electorate itself -- that the reservations and doubts that the general population and general electorate seems to feel about Obama were really prevalent in the Democratic primaries, because for any number of weeks, the sort of conventional wisdom was that "Obama's about to put Sen. Clinton away," and it never quite happened like that. So yes, I think Obama is running way behind the Democratic Party brand and McCain is certainly running better than Republicans, largely because he is perceived as more of a maverick than a Bush Republican.

Mark Murray: I do agree that Barack Obama has some problems, particularly with white voters. There is an interesting new Democracy Corps Poll, a poll that's put out by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, and it actually showed that Barack Obama versus John Kerry in 2004 is running poorer than Kerry did among many whites, particularly among older whites. So that is a problem for Obama. On the other hand, some of that is offset by Obama doing much better than Kerry did among African-Americans, independents and younger voters, and so some of his weaknesses are offset by some of his strengths. But no doubt, for him to really capitalize in this environment, he's going to need to shore up some of his weaknesses.

However, to be a little counterintuitive, I would actually say that a lot of this also has to do with John McCain. I was looking back at a March NBC-Wall Street Journal poll that had both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton running about 2 or 3 points ahead of John McCain, even though the generic ballot had Democrats winning by 15 points. Against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, John McCain was doing much better than your average Republican, and a lot of that has to do with McCain's appeal with independent voters. And whether or not that holds up from here to November is an interesting question. But certainly, John McCain's maverick brand, his relationship with independents, really has helped him in this type of environment.

So I think it's two things. It's Obama's weaknesses and also some of John McCain's strengths. That said, the latest AP poll had Barack Obama 6 points over McCain, and if Barack Obama wins a 6-point election come November, that would be one of the biggest election margins of victory we've seen in the last few presidential cycles.

Schaller: It's funny, I have heard repeatedly from pundits, and I think that they're right about this, that this election is mostly going to be a referendum on Obama. Mark Shields recently on "The NewsHour" made a comparison to the 1980 race, the argument basically being that the country was unhappy with Jimmy Carter then; the country is unhappy with George Bush now. Even though I think Ben Ginsberg's point that it's not Bush running again and not necessarily an heir apparent in McCain, still the parallel here is people in 1980 were not quite sure about Reagan and it was up to Ronald Reagan to assuage and assure the country. Is that a fair parallel? Does Barack Obama need to pass a minimum threshold, and if so, what is it going to take to do that?

Murray: I completely agree that the 1980 comparison is apt. And a lot of the burden is on Barack Obama to make the sale, just as [it was on] Ronald Reagan in 1980. And as we all saw, Reagan was able to make that sale. It wasn't apparent in poll numbers in the summer, but once you got to the fall, and once you ended up getting to the debates, it was clear that Reagan was going to be the big winner.

It's also interesting that another change election was back in 1992 and obviously, Bill Clinton, the challenger, ended up beating the incumbent, George H.W. Bush. What's very interesting about that is that, even in a very big change environment, with 80 percent of Americans saying the country was on the wrong track, had Ross Perot not been in the race, it would have been a much, much closer election. And so, I think you can go one of two ways. Either Barack Obama makes the sale and he wins convincingly like Reagan did in 1980, or he doesn't and we need to fasten our seatbelts for another very close election.

Ginsberg: I would agree that this election really comes down to a referendum on Barack Obama. McCain is much more of a known quantity in the country, and it is a change year by all objective indications, meaning that Obama does have to meet the test. But while it's a change election, we're also much more aware than in either '92 or '80 of what a dangerous world it is out there. The test that Obama has to meet is a lot larger. And what his real drawback and weakness is, is his lack of experience. I mean the fact that he has only been in the Senate for four years, that he doesn't really have any experience on the world stage except for his recent rock tour, is really going to be what voters focus on. Now, lack of experience combined with a whiff of elitism is really the test that he has to make. For that reason I do think that the debates, particularly, are going to loom very large this year, because that will be the first time that the American people see the two candidates face to face. But Obama is going to have to meet the test that he can handle a dangerous and scary world.

Edsall: I hate to say that Ben may be partially right. I think also in addition, Obama has a problem in that he doesn't put body behind his words. You don't know what really makes him angry, you don't know really what gets his dander up or really drives his interest. In addition to the problem of a lack of substance, often in his rhetoric there's a lack of emotional content. It's all high and charismatic, but it doesn't have the bass tones, and he's got a ways to go on that.

Schaller: Of course, this could change. Mark is right: It could end up being a 6- or 8-point win for Obama in the end as people come around and become familiar with him. But if it is the "candidate effect" that explains how close this race is, is Obama's political style unrealistic -- his call for a change of politics, his call for high-road style of politics? As Tom was suggesting, perhaps Obama needs to get a little rougher?

Edsall: Having raised the question, I'll answer. I think you can be for a different style of politics and you still can get angry and you can still get excited. It doesn't necessarily preclude each other. I thought, for example, Obama's reaction to the Paris Hilton ad was a little thin. He could have, if he had chosen to, taken real offense and gotten angry and said that "if McCain's going to say that type of thing about me, I'm going to punch him in the face," or maybe something more polite. But instead it's, "He's going the low road." He has put himself in this position where going the high road seems to preclude that, but I think it's an incorrect interpretation of politics.

Ginsberg: I'm trying to figure out where this high road is that he's traveling on.

Edsall: He hasn't hired you yet, Ben.

Ginsberg: Yeah, if that's your definition, Edsall, you need a wider focus. The truth is the ad he has out today [Aug. 6] would not be defined as high-road politics, especially not with imposing a heartbeat in the middle of it, one of the greatest subliminal effects in an ad since the "Rats" ad in 2000 that the New York Times made such a big deal about, and I bet there won't be quite such a big deal about this heart ad. But nonetheless, Obama has shown that he's not particularly on the high road. I think that was true in the primaries in the way that he mixed it up and also basically the way he has conducted -- I think, in a sense, he's damaged his own brand and position by the way he and his surrogates have conducted the campaign.

Murray: I'm going to split Tom and Ben's answer here. One of the things that has really propelled Barack Obama, including winning the Democratic primary, is this reputation of someone who's above it all, who is this Mr. Nice Guy. But as we learned in Ryan Lizza's piece in the New Yorker, this is a guy who's practiced Chicago politics as well as anyone else despite living only a short time in Chicago. I think in some respects he has shown an ability to wield some elbows and be tough. One of his strengths is actually being able to convince independents that he's a totally different type of person with a different type of tone and still run a pretty tough campaign.

Now, he's certainly not airing the Britney and Paris ads the way that John McCain is, where it has gotten a little personal, but we did see Barack just yesterday in this whole brouhaha over tire inflation, get really indignant and basically accuse the Republican Party of being nothing more than ignorant on this subject matter. And I agree with Tom, it's not something that we see a lot from Barack Obama, indignation and a lot of fire, but it is there, and if he taps that more, that could actually be a big positive for him over the next three months.

Schaller: If "candidate effects" matter, we so far have only spoken of one candidate, Barack Obama, and Mark raises the specter of the ads that McCain has taken out. So whether the criticism of McCain, that he's taking the low road is fair or not, are the ads working?

Murray: I think it really helped him in the short term. While it is problematic to look at the race every single day through these Gallup tracking polls, it's probably been our best barometer to see whether or not he ended up getting any bounce from his overseas trip. And interestingly enough, pretty much after that trip was over, Obama actually soared to his highest rating in that tracking survey, 9 points. And we had never seen him that high against McCain. And then all of a sudden came those ads, the Britney, Paris ads, the charge that the Obama campaign was playing the race card, and then even the Web video that got a lot of media attention comparing Obama to Moses and Jesus. And we saw Obama's numbers go down. And so I think in the short term, what that strategy ended up doing was really mitigate any type of bounce Obama was going to get from that overseas trip.

I do think that there is a potential danger long term for McCain. As I was mentioning, a lot of McCain's appeal and the fact that he's doing well in this anti-Republican environment, really speaks to his appeal with independents and his maverick status. And if the Obama campaign is able to say that he's running essentially the same campaign that George W. Bush ran in 2004, that could be problematic for him in this environment. So I think it's a short-term gain and a potential long-term danger.

Ginsberg: I agree with Mark about that. There certainly was a short-term gain; there is a long-term danger. I think what's interesting about the daily tracking polls, and I certainly agree that we ought not put all that much faith in them, but nonetheless, the tightening up of the race has been caused by Obama losing numbers as opposed to McCain gaining numbers. So from a Republican perspective, one of the worrisome parts is that Obama has much greater potential for strength. That's sort of emphasized by how they're running their campaign, with this huge organizing operation that seems determined to expand the electorate, which will give them more room to grow when actual votes are counted. And it's true that the McCain campaign realizes they need to get back to his maverick image, so their new ad that's out today, Wednesday, is really designed to reinforce the fact that John McCain is a maverick. Now, being a maverick for 26 years in Washington, he also buys the issue of, Is he responsible for the problems? So there are some tensions within his strategy as well.

Edsall: I think McCain has been wandering around and has not developed an effective persona for himself either. He did have this huge appeal in 2000 to independent voters and a lot of centrist Democrats. As Ben points out, he's stayed exactly where he is, he hasn't moved up. I'm just wondering if he's placed a ceiling on his own campaign, on his own numbers, by conducting a Steve Schmidt kind of campaign as opposed to a Mike Murphy kind of campaign -- to describe the two consultants, the first one in this year and the second one in 2000. And he's also gotten much more uptight with the press, as has Obama. But I'm a little wary of making leaps of judgment at this point.

Schaller: One of you mentioned the Obama world tour, and McCain's ads and McCain's critique sort of blunting the potential benefit Obama may have gotten from that. The media seem to think it was a huge success, but of course, sometimes when the media think something is correct, the voters disagree. So I'm wondering whether that world tour was a success -- did Obama actually get a bump from it, was it something he needed to check off, or was it a net negative in the long run in the eyes of the voters?

Ginsberg: I think it's really hard to generalize about that world tour because what I think it actually did was just confirmed people's perceptions of Obama. If you're a running dog in the media, like my two colleagues today, you sort of saw it as a big show and a success. If you were a Democrat you saw that he could be a presence -- whether it was a substantive presence is a different question -- you saw he could be a presence on the world stage. If you were a Republican, you saw it as a glitzy show without anything behind it. And how independents react to it, I'm not really sure. I think that plays out over time. I give him credit for needing to check that box, to be able to do it, because I think, as in any campaign, what you're really doing is you're building a mosaic and you're filling in pieces, and you hope that mosaic looks rich, full and vibrant in early November when people go to vote. And so I think that what the tour did for Obama was provide some of the mosaic they're going to need to fill in the whole picture.

Edsall: I'm getting really tired of endorsing Ben, but I think he's right. The whole campaign at this stage is a battle -- because Obama is a blank slate -- is a battle to fill out his mosaic. Obama did fill out, to some extent, his credentials on the international front. You don't hear much on that issue, which was being pounded before. But he did create a picture that lent itself to the satire of being a celebrity, which McCain then pounced on. On net, I think it was probably a slight plus.

Murray: I agree with Ben and Tom on this. I will say that not only was it a check mark for him, but I do think what you're seeing from Barack Obama over the last month is obvious attempts to shore up weaknesses. And whether it's trying to bolster his national-security and foreign-policy credentials by going overseas, or over the last two weeks campaigning in rural Missouri, Youngstown, Ohio -- going to areas where he wasn't as successful in the Democratic primaries -- he's really trying to shore up perceived weaknesses. When you compare that to the McCain campaign, it is a little striking. McCain is really pouncing on the issue of energy and trying to shore up his economic credentials. But on other matters, particularly in looking at the economy as a whole or campaigning in urban areas or really going after young voters, McCain doesn't seem, at this stage, to be trying to shore up as many of his weaknesses as Obama is.

Now whether or not Obama is going to be successful in convincing independent swing voters that he does have these national-security, foreign-policy credentials, or winning over these white working-class voters, that remains to be seen. But I do think that one of the big stories over the past month has been Obama really trying to shore up his weaknesses.

Schaller: Speaking of those weaknesses, all campaigns are really about four messages: For each candidate, the message is about yourself and your opponent, two by two. And what liberals and Democrats are complaining about is that McCain is using the politics of the Other, saying that Obama is foreign and has a funny-sounding name and he's black, whereas you'll hear conservatives and Republicans and the McCain campaign say that is not the critique. They say the critique is that he's either too liberal or that he's merely too green: He's just not ready to be president. How much of this attack is really typical or traditional character assassination? How much of it is really ideological? And which parts of it are working?

Murray: I do think that one thing that differentiates McCain's attacks and Obama's attacks right now is how personal it's been on the McCain end. Seizing on Obama as the world's greatest celebrity, when John McCain's a pretty famous guy himself, does seem to end up where it feels like the folks at the campaign headquarters in Crystal City, Va., have really taken it kind of personally. Even looking back at 2004, in the John Kerry vs. George W. Bush race, where Ben and the Republicans did a great job of branding John Kerry as an out-of-touch liberal who's not as strong as you might think, it never appeared that it was as personal. There seems to be some contempt from the McCain side of things. And I do find that interesting vs. past presidential campaigns. As Ben just mentioned, John McCain is out with a new ad, emphasizing his maverick status and the fact that he's been a reformer in Washington for 20-plus years. But everything else over the past couple of weeks has been very personal.

Edsall: I would say that the ads that ran against Kerry with the windsurfing and the ads against Dukakis -- all of those were pretty much as personal or certainly created a persona. And in fact, I thought they were pretty effective in creating personas that were not acceptable to much of the mainstream electorate. McCain has been trying to do that to some extent, but he's only partially succeeded. I wouldn't jump too far on saying that these are really personal-attack ads. They are strange. To use Britney Spears and Paris Hilton is not the same as using real pictures of the candidate windsurfing. They are kind of a leap, but I wouldn't call them personal.

Ginsberg: I kind of have a different perspective on this. First of all, I do think that much of the Obama campaign has been a cult-of-personality campaign. If you can come up with your own presidential-like seal, then that is the definition of a cult-of-personality campaign. And so, when you make certain things about your persona, like whether you're a celebrity who lacks substance when you've only been in the Senate for four years, it's pretty fair game in terms of whether you should be president. In terms of whether Obama has a funny-sounding name and looks like the other [presidents], let's remember that it has been Barack Obama who has been raising that issue and saying it and has mentioned it at least a half dozen times over the past couple of months. So, Obama in effect has been injecting that, and then to say that somehow that shouldn't be a part of the conversation and the back and forth between the two campaigns, I really don't agree with.

Let me also say that what the Obama campaign has been doing is pretty personal also. The notion of trying to say that McCain is like George Bush, which has been a consistent theme in the Obama campaign, is pretty personal about McCain, especially given the dynamics of the McCain-Bush operation. And again the ad that's out today that includes the heartbeat sound in the middle, which I suspect is intended to draw negative inferences about McCain's age, strikes me as pretty personal. I really reject the notion that this is a one-way personal-ad campaign. I think it is, as Tom pointed out, not terribly different than what's happened in past years.

Schaller: The conventional wisdom in the fall and maybe even into the early part of the Democratic primary season was that the Republicans were licking their chops at the prospect of running against Hillary Clinton. With all her baggage and her feminism, she was going to be an easy target for the Rush Limbaughs and for the Republicans running against the sort of liberal, Hollywood, Clinton Democratic tradition. They were fearful of Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton was going to have all these down-ballot drags for the Democrats, and she was the ideal opponent. I am wondering now if maybe the perception within Republican circles is reversed and that they're not necessarily unhappy with having drawn Barack Obama in the final?

Ginsberg: I think they're not unhappy with having drawn Barack Obama in the finals, but I don't really agree with the notion that there was anything approaching a unified Republican view about licking their chops on Hillary Clinton. I think there were some entrepreneurial consultants, a bit out of the mainstream, who thought they would be able to raise a ton of dough for negative ads against Clinton, but I don't think there was at all a consensus amongst the Republican campaigns that Clinton was a better candidate to run against than Obama. I think it was really pretty split. Both had their weaknesses. Republicans really didn't know before last February who their candidate was going to be, so you didn't really know what the matchup was going to look like, so I'm not sure I agree with that.

Schaller: Let me rephrase the question for Tom and Mark. This was a Hillary Clinton critique [of Obama] late in the primary season, which was, "Hey, you're going to need somebody tough enough to beat the Republicans -- and me, and by extension my husband, we know how to beat the Republicans." We can't know for sure what the race would look like if Hillary were the nominee right now, but is there something to that insinuation that the Clintons were making right up until the end of the primary?

Edsall: I would argue there is something to it. As I said earlier on, I think Obama had better show some toughness himself and show he will fight for what he believes in. You can't run a campaign from on high, and I think he better get into the trenches and punch it up some. He has not done that. So far, the Hillary critique has some teeth to it.

Murray: I do think that if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic nominee now, the race would probably be as close if not even a little bit closer vs. John McCain. Hillary Clinton would bring some very good strengths in a general-election matchup against John McCain -- one, as Tom just mentioned, her really big fighting persona and a long history of battling the Republican Party. She'd also probably be doing much better in Ohio and Florida right now. That said, she'd probably also have some problems in other states where Barack Obama is over-performing, like in Colorado and Virginia. Also, one thing that was very interesting is that she's always had a net negative amongst independents. Democrats, as we saw in their 2004 race and also in their 2006 successes, need to do very well amongst independent and swing voters to be able to win nationally. Hillary Clinton might have been able to do it, but I do think that when you look at the poll numbers, Barack Obama has more upside with that group. It'd be fun to look at how Hillary Clinton would be doing in a computer program, but I think that things would probably be as close between Hillary and McCain right now as they are with Obama and McCain.

Schaller: Let's move to an exit question. Put yourself momentarily in the shoes of [McCain campaign manager] Steve Schmidt or [Obama campaign manager] David Axelrod. You've got three months left. You've got VP picks and conventions and debates and ads to create and circulate. Give me one piece of advice you'd give to each candidate for Obama to open up a lead again or for McCain to keep it close as it moves toward November.

Murray: If I were David Axelrod, what I would focus all my energies on is really to shine at the debates. These will be a big moment. I would have as much preparation as possible and really be able to draw contrasts there. One thing that's interesting, as we all saw over 20-plus debates during the Democratic primary season, Barack Obama often wasn't the best debater. At the same time, he did have a lot more practice than John McCain, particularly in one-on-one debates. You saw him have three debates with Hillary Clinton. I think to shine at the debate, I don't know what kind of advice or how, but that'd be the one thing I'd focus on.

And then for the McCain campaign, I just go back and continue -- to use a boxing metaphor -- continue to bearhug Obama. To really make this race all about him, to really focus all the energy they can on him. I do think that in some respects, the Britney/Paris ads, the trying to really set the campaign's agenda, while it might end up backfiring in the long run, is probably as good of a tactic as you can have now, when most Americans are really going to judge this presidential election on whether they want to have Barack Obama as president or not.

Ginsberg: For my old buddy Steve Schmidt, I think he has a genuine American hero for a candidate, and he needs to reinforce every day and every way that that is true and, at the same time, draw the contrast with Barack Obama as not ready to lead. Just too inexperienced. And more than anything else, I think that John McCain as a candidate has shown a weakness for not staying on message consistently. If there's one thing that the McCain campaign has to do to make the overarching strategy work, it's to stay on message consistently -- that's true of the debates, Mark's absolutely right about that, but it's also true with the daily campaign appearances.

For David Axelrod, I think they have to pick a number of issues and events that show that Obama is ready to lead. That includes the debates to be sure, but also substantive issues and personality traits as well. And above all else, what I think they're doing well -- and the story that never gets reported on before the elections but gets talked about a lot in exit polls and the day-after analysis -- is the organization. Make sure that your organization is well-funded and really out there expanding the electorate and bringing in new voters to the process. That's the story that doesn't get seen and reported on as you follow what the candidates do publicly on a daily basis, but boy, can that make a difference in a 3-, 4-, or 5-point national race.

Edsall: I think that McCain has sort of begun a message of Obama as an elitist, but to make it really work, you have to show that the liberal elitist is actually going to cost the average guy money or a job. That the elitist is going to tilt money or benefits away from regular working people -- i.e., whites -- and towards special-interest groups and the well-to-do. That's all the resources of government, not just money. That's the very nasty process Republicans have done well with in the past, and I think McCain is going to have to do that in a more effective way that goes well beyond Britney Spears.

I think the reverse is true for Obama. He's got to put some detail to his rhetoric. You have to be a candidate who is going to make life better at a time the country is having real economic difficulties and may face much worse ones in the future. You can't be highfalutin, in a sense. He's got to come down from the mountain to the people. That's my two cents for today.

Schaller: I'd like to thank all three of our participants, Tom Edsall and Ben Ginsberg and Mark Murray.

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MSNBC's Rachel Maddow of the Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel Maddow's TV Ratings Shoot Through the Roof

The greatest thing for news junkies is the current line-up on MSNBC. Pundits Chris Matthews, Keith Oblberman have been joined by the super-bright Rhodes Scholar, Rachel Maddow. The girl is smart! She is also courageous and calls a spade a spade. Check her out.

By Jan Frel, AlterNetPosted on September 18, 2008, Printed on September 19, 2008

McCain's Closing Argument

Washington PostColumnistBy George F. WillSeptember 18, 2008

Man is in love and loves what vanishes.

What more is there to say?

-- William Butler Yeats

Conservatives, who reputedly have lumps of coal where their hearts should be, have fallen in love. So have many people who are not doctrinal conservatives. The world is a sweeter place because Sarah Palin has increased the quantity of love, but this is not a reliable foundation for John McCain's campaign.

The tech bubble was followed by the housing bubble, which has been topped by the Palin bubble. Bubbles will always be with us, because irrational exuberance always will be. Its symptom is the assumption that old limits have yielded to undreamed-of possibilities: The Dow will always rise, as will housing prices, and rapture about a running mate can be decisive in a presidential election.

Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.

McCain should, therefore, enunciate a closing argument for his candidacy that goes to fundamentals of governance, concerning which the vice presidency is usually peripheral. His argument should assert the virtues of something that voters, judging by their behavior over time, prefer -- divided government.

The incumbent Republican president's job approval is in the low 30s but is about 10 points higher than that of the Democratic-controlled Congress. The 22nd Amendment will banish the president in January, but Congress will then be even more Democratic than it is now. Does the country really want there to be no check on it? Consider two things that will quickly become law unless McCain is there to veto them or unless -- this is a thin reed on which to depend -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has 40 reliable senators to filibuster them to deserved deaths.

The exquisitely misnamed Employee Free Choice Act would strip from workers their right to secret ballots in unionization elections. Instead, unions could use the "card check" system: Once a majority of a company's employees -- each person confronted one on one by a union organizer in an inherently coercive setting -- sign cards expressing consent, the union would be certified as the bargaining agent for all workers. Proving that the law's purpose is less to improve workers' conditions than to capture dues payers for the unions, the law would forbid employers from discouraging unionization by giving "unilateral" -- not negotiated -- improvements in compensation and working conditions.

Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of "fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives' dominance.

Today, as usual, but perhaps even more so, Americans are in the iron grip of cognitive dissonance. It is a genteel mental disorder afflicting those people -- essentially everybody -- who have contradictory convictions and yearnings. Consider health care. Americans want 2008 medicine at 1958 prices, and universal coverage with undiminished choice -- without mandatory purchases or government interference with choices, including doctor-patient relationships. As usual, neither party completely pleases a majority of voters. That is why 19 of the 31 elections since World War II produced or preserved divided government -- the presidency and at least one chamber of Congress controlled by different parties.

Divided government compels compromises that curb each party's excesses, especially both parties' proclivities for excessive spending when unconstrained by an institution controlled by the other party. William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that in the past 50 years, "government spending has increased an average of only 1.73 percent annually during periods of divided government. This number more than triples, to 5.26 percent, for periods of unified government."

By picking Palin, McCain got the country's attention. That is a perishable thing, and before it dissipates, he should show the country his veto pen.

georgewill@washpost.com

Donna Brazil

Katrina Memories Give Republicans Reason to Worry

September 2, 2008 By Donna BrazileRoll Call Staff

What a difference three years have made in the federal government’s understanding of how to effectively, efficiently and compassionately deal with a natural disaster like a powerful hurricane hitting our nation’s shores.

While the soap opera aspect of the Republican presidential campaign continues to unfold under the mainstream media radar, I’d rather spend my time and attention while I’m here at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., focusing on Hurricane Gustav, whose damaging winds and torrential rainfall are at this very moment wreaking havoc on 300 miles of New Orleans levees still under repair from three years ago.

The Republicans gathered here to nominate Arizona Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appear hopeful that Hurricane Gustav will wash away our memories of how the Bush White House and Republican-run federal government mishandled Hurricane Katrina.

Three years ago, we as a nation sat transfixed in horror as we watched our fellow Americans either bake or drown while waiting to be rescued from rooftops and the hellholes that were the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. After three years, the images that once burned onto disbelieving retinas continue to sear our hearts and memory.

It is impossible to forget the horrors of that week and the pain and suffering of those left behind and forgotten. Nor should we forget. Americans were left to die. And we watched them being left to die. More than 1,600 folks did die. Dead from their government’s incompetence, they live on in our thoughts and prayers — and votes.

Ironically, almost three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and displaced hundreds of thousand of Americans left scattered across the country, the nation is once again reminded that it matters who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. This time, the federal government is not outsourcing its responsibilities to the state and local government. This time, the executive branch has instructed the federal government to respond.

The 2008 Republican National Convention is still up in the air as organizers continue to scramble to pull together a truncated schedule that allows them to nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates. The delegates and alternates who have gathered from across America are truly sympathetic to the plight of those who had to evacuate.

Yes, they are deeply concerned. Indeed, as I write this, they are looking for ways to help the GOP delegates from areas threatened by Hurricane Gustav get home safely to assess the damage and begin the repairing process.

No doubt McCain is painfully aware that all eyes will be on how his party and its leader will treat this latest attack on New Orleans and its Gulf Coast neighbors. No doubt he remembers where he was when Katrina hit landfall three years ago: in Arizona with President Bush celebrating his birthday. Like the president, who is holding fort in the emergency command centers in Texas, McCain is aware that the American people are watching. Pictures matter, but so do public policies.

We continue to lack public policies that will help people with houses damaged from Gustav (and Katrina and Rita, for that matter) repair their homes and rebuild their lives. Tens of thousands of Americans remain exiled from their homes.

I met one such survivor here at the Republican convention. She’s working as a top chef at one of the major hotels. Like me, she was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. When raging storm waters flooded her home, she fled to safety in St. Paul.

While watching the TV set near the hotel dining room with her, I watch as tears stream down her face. I promise her things will be better this time. I tell her the government will get everyone out safely and, later, help them get back home.

“I hope so,” she tells me. “I still am here and cannot go back.”

Aletha is not alone. So many thousands of people, including my own siblings, must answer many questions after this storm has passed. Can they go back and rebuild their lives? Can they afford to replace the roofs, windows and the other broken bits of their homes destroyed by Gustav? And what about the schools, the roads, the bridges and the hospitals? Will they also be rebuilt? When?

Soon, we can only hope. Just as we can only hope that the Republicans gathered here in Minnesota this week will not forget Gustav’s victims after they return home and it’s back to politics as usual.

McCain faces a unique challenge this week. He must not only distance himself from the uncompassionate and incompetent response of the Bush administration concerning Hurricane Katrina; he must also distance himself from his own hapless and heartless response.

After all, McCain voted against the emergency funding bill, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.

He voted — twice — against establishing a commission to study the response to Hurricane Katrina.

And he opposed granting financial relief to families affected by Hurricane Katrina.

McCain talks about putting the country first. I support those who talk about putting the American people first.

How McCain reacts to and deals with these two latest events — Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Palin (the soap opera involving the politically naive rookie he chose to be his running mate) — will demonstrate to the American people the kind of judgment and leadership they can expect from him as president. Along with the rest of America, the good and beleaguered folks of the Gulf Coast states will be watching closely. And, come Election Day, they will not forget.

Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000, runs her own grass-roots political consulting firm.

Official 2008 Obama/McCain Presidential Debate Schedule

The official Presidential debate schedule for John McCain and Barack Obama has been finalized and released in a joint statement from each campaign. There will also be a vice presidential debate as well.

Here is the full official debate schedule:

Forums:

August 16, 2008: Video: Saddleback Civil Forum with Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, Lake Forest California(Not part of the official sanctioned schedule but both candidates attended)

1. First Presidential Debate: – Date: September 26 – Site: University of Mississippi – Topic: Foreign Policy & National Security – Moderator: Jim Lehrer – Staging: Podium debate – Answer Format: The debate will be broken into nine, 9-minute segments. The moderator will introduce a topic and allow each candidate 2 minutes to comment. After these initial answers, the moderator will facilitate an open discussion of the topic for the remaining 5 minutes, ensuring that both candidates receive an equal amount of time to comment

3. Second Presidential Debate – Date: October 7 – Site: Belmont University – Moderator: Tom Brokaw – Staging: Town Hall debate – Format: The moderator will call on members of the audience (and draw questions from the internet). Each candidate will have 2 minutes to respond to each question. Following those initial answers, the moderator will invite the candidates to respond to the previous answers, for a total of 1 minute, ensuring that both candidates receive an equal amount of time to comment. In the spirit of the Town Hall, all questions will come from the audience (or internet), and not the moderator.

4. Third Presidential Debate – Date: October 15 – Site: Hofstra University – Topic: Domestic and Economic policy – Moderator: Bob Schieffer – Staging: Candidates will be seated at a table – Answer Format: Same as First Presidential Debate – Closing Statements: At the end of this debate (only) each candidate shall have the opportunity for a 90 second closing statement.

All four debates will begin at 9pm ET, and last for 90 minutes. Both campaigns also agreed to accept the CPD’s participation rules for third-party candidate participation.

All 4 debates will be broadcast on the major broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX. They will also be aired on cable news channels such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN.

We will have full videos of each debate uploaded once they air.

Palin's Problem

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, September 5, 2008

"There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, 'Who is this man?' and 'Can we trust this man with the presidency?' "

-- Fred Thompson on John McCain, Sept. 2This was the most effective line of the entire Republican convention: a ringing affirmation of John McCain's authenticity and a not-so-subtle indictment of Barack Obama's insubstantiality. What's left of this line of argument, however, after John McCain picks Sarah Palin for vice president?Palin is an admirable and formidable woman. She has energized the Republican base and single-handedly unified the Republican convention behind McCain. She performed spectacularly in her acceptance speech. Nonetheless, the choice of Palin remains deeply problematic.

It's clear that McCain picked her because he had decided that he needed a game-changer. But why? He'd closed the gap in the polls with Obama. True, that had more to do with Obama sagging than McCain gaining. But what's the difference? You win either way.

Obama was sagging because of missteps that reflected the fundamental weakness of his candidacy. Which suggested McCain's strategy: Make this a referendum on Obama, surely the least experienced, least qualified, least prepared presidential nominee in living memory.

Palin fatally undermines this entire line of attack. This is through no fault of her own. It is simply a function of her rookie status. The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates.

So why did McCain do it? He figured it's a Democratic year. The Republican brand is deeply tarnished. The opposition is running on "change" in a change election. So McCain gambled that he could steal the change issue for himself -- a crazy brave, characteristically reckless, inconceivably difficult maneuver -- by picking an authentically independent, tough-minded reformer. With Palin, he doubles down on change.

The problem is the inherent oddity of the incumbent party running on change. Here were Republicans -- the party that controlled the White House for eight years and both houses of Congress for five -- wildly cheering the promise to take on Washington. I don't mean to be impolite, but who's controlled Washington this decade?

Moreover, McCain was giving up his home turf of readiness to challenge Obama on his home turf of change. Can that possibly be pulled off? The calculation was to choose demographics over thematics. Palin's selection negates the theme of readiness. But she does bring important constituencies. She has the unique potential of energizing the base while at the same time appealing to independents.

This is unusual. Normally the wing-nut candidate alienates the center. Palin promises a twofer because of her potential appeal to the swing-state Reagan Democrats that Hillary Clinton carried in the primaries. Not for reasons of gender -- Clinton didn't carry those voters because she was a woman -- but because more culturally conservative working-class whites might find affinity with Palin's small-town, middle/frontier American narrative and values.

The gamble is enormous. In a stroke, McCain gratuitously forfeited his most powerful argument against Obama. And this was even before Palin's inevitable liabilities began to pile up -- inevitable because any previously unvetted neophyte has "issues." The kid. The state trooper investigation. And worst, the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.McCain has one hope. It is suggested by the strength of Palin's performance Wednesday night. In a year of compounding ironies, the McCain candidacy could be saved, and the Palin choice vindicated, by one thing: Palin pulls an Obama.

Obama showed that star power can trump the gravest of biographical liabilities. The sheer elegance, intelligence and power of his public presence have muted the uneasy feeling about his unreadiness. Palin does not reach Obama's mesmeric level. Her appeal is far more earthy, workmanlike and direct. Yet she managed to banish a week's worth of unfriendly media scrutiny and self-inflicted personal liabilities with a single triumphant speech.

Now, Obama had 19 months to make his magic obscure his thinness. Palin has nine weeks. Nevertheless, if she too can neutralize unreadiness with star power, then the demographic advantages she brings McCain -- appeal to the base and to Reagan Democrats -- coupled with her contribution to the reform theme, might just pay off. The question is: Can she do the magic -- unteleprompted extemporaneous magic, from now on -- for the next nine weeks?letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Sarah Palin was Miss Congeniality

National Election News from The Miss America Organization

This has to be a first: the Miss America Paegant issued a press release on the VP stakes.

McCain Names Former Miss Alaska Contestant as Running Mate

We are pleased to announce that former Miss Alaska contestant, Sarah Heath Palin, has just been named as John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket. In 1984, Palin was chosen as Miss Wasilla and went on to become the first runner-up in the Miss Alaska Pageant and received the Miss Congeniality award the same year. Her husband, Todd Palin was a judge in the 2008 Miss Alaska Pageant.

Congratulations on this exciting news for the Miss Alaska Organization!

Oprah and Michelle Obama

The Oprah-fication of Michelle Obama

August 26, 2008New York Times By The Editorial Board

If Barack Obama is elected president, a good chunk of credit should go to Oprah Winfrey. Her early and enthusiastic endorsement of Senator Obama – and her heavily attended appearances with him in Iowa and South Carolina – played a big role in winning over bit parts of Middle America to the Obama cause.

Ms. Winfrey has since faded into the background of the campaign, but her impact persists – perhaps nowhere more than in Monday night’s speech by Michelle Obama.

It was one of the most important speeches of the convention – far more so than the crowd-pleasing valedictory of Senator Edward M. Kennedy the same night. The campaign still has a significant selling job to do with Michelle Obama, who has been repeatedly baited by Republicans as angry, hostile to whites, and un-American.

Ms. Obama did an admirable job of turning back the right-wing assault – and she did it with an Oprah script:

Sentiment Is More Important Than Politics – One reason Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Senator Obama was so unusual is that with few exceptions, she has stayed away from politics. What she sells on her television show and in her magazine, for the most part, are sentiment, good feeling, and self-improvement.

In her speech, Ms. Obama made the major theme family – a very sweet version of family. She began with her brother, whom she described as “watching over me.” She moved on to the sustaining love of her mother and her late father, and then to her husband and children.

Doting wife and mother may be the role Americans have come to expect from their first ladies, but it was laid on heavily.

Ms. Obama has always talked a good deal about her family, but she has done so with a refreshing tartness. It was not love at first sight with her husband. When he first began asking her out, she has said, she refused, concerned it would interfere with their work.

She has talked about being the taskmaster in the Obama household, doling out assignments and keeping the girls on the straight and narrow. Those more piquant notes were left out Monday night.

Life is About Triumphing Over Adversity – Ms. Winfrey, who has spoken often of being a childhood sexual abuse victim, has emphasized the importance of rising above difficult circumstances. It is one of her favorite themes in life and literature.

Ms. Obama has a lot to be proud of, and her speech emphasized the struggle. She described herself as “raised on the South Side of Chicago by a father who was a blue-collar city worker.” Perhaps since her own rise has been so steady, she recounted her father’s difficulties in detail. He battled multiple sclerosis in his 30s, she said, struggled to button his shirt, and used “two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss.”

Keeping a Gratitude Journal – Ms. Winfrey has had a lot to be unhappy about over the years, from the early abuse, to racism during her childhood in the Jim Crow South, to obstacles of more recent vintage. Her advice has always been not to dwell on the negative, but to keep a journal of everything one is grateful for.

So it was with Ms. Obama Monday night. The comments she has at times made about America’s flaws - refreshingly candid perhaps, but also politically maladroit - were deleted. In their place was a whole section on “Why I Love This Country.”

The “Oprah Moment” — Ms. Obama’s speech ended with an “Oprah moment.” As a surprise — and as those free-car winners can attest, Ms. Winfrey loves surprises — Senator Obama appeared from a remote location (in a swing state), and bantered with the family. “How do you think Mommy did?” It was quintessential Oprah.

There is, of course, a reason Ms. Winfrey is so popular. Her story lines are ones that resonate strongly with many Americans – and non-Americans. Through those themes, Ms. Winfrey may do as much for Michelle Obama as she has already done for Barack Obama.

John McCain and George Bush

Too Much of a Bad Thing

August 24, 2008Op-Ed ColumnistNew York TimesBy MAUREEN DOWDWASHINGTON

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.

I figured, given her stringent moral standards, that her great affection for McCain would be dimmed.

“So,” I asked her, “what do you think of that?”

“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

His brutal hiatus in the Hanoi Hilton is one of the most stirring narratives ever told on the presidential trail — a trail full of heroic war stories. It created an enormous credit line of good will with the American people. It also allowed McCain, the errant son of the admiral who was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific during Vietnam — his jailers dubbed McCain the “Crown Prince” — to give himself some credit.

“He has been preoccupied with escaping the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others,” read a psychiatric evaluation in his medical files. “He feels his experiences and performance as a P.O.W. have finally permitted this to happen.”

The ordeal also gave a more sympathetic cast to his carousing. As Robert Timberg wrote in “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” “What is true is that a number of P.O.W.’s, in those first few years after their release, often acted erratically, their lives pockmarked by drastic mood swings and uncharacteristic behavior before achieving a more mellow equilibrium.” Timberg said Hemingway’s line that people were stronger in the broken places was not always right.

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

The Kerry Swift-boat attacks in 2004 struck down the off-limits signs that were traditionally on a candidate’s military service. Many Democrats are willing to repay the favor, and Republicans clearly no longer see war medals as sacrosanct.

In a radio interview last week, Representative Terry Everett, an Alabama Republican, let loose with a barrage at the Democrat John Murtha, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who is the head of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, calling him “cut-and-run John Murtha” and an “idiot.”

“And don’t talk to me about him being an ex-marine,” Everett said. “Lord, that was 40 years ago. A lot of stuff can happen in 40 years.”

The real danger to the McCain crew in overusing the P.O.W. line so much that it’s a punch line is that it will give Obama an opening for critical questions:

While McCain’s experience was heroic, did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to U.S. military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, “We are all Georgians,” mentality?

Country Star Supports Obama

Toby Keith said he likes Barack Obama

Toby Keith, perhaps best known to non-country audiences for his post-Sept. 11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," says he's a Democrat, and was impressed by the senator from Illinois.

Keith has said in the past that the 2002 song — which included lines aimed at the Taliban like "we lit up your world like the Fourth of July" — was more patriotic than pro-war.

Asked while promoting his new movie "Beer For My Horses" about the role of patriotism in the current presidential election, Keith replied: "There's a big part of America that really believes that there is a war on terrorism, and that we need to finish up.

"So I thought it was beautiful the other day when Obama went to Afghanistan and got educated about Afghanistan and Iraq. He came back and said some really nice things.

"So as far as leadership and patriotism goes, I think it's really important that those things have to take place. And I think he's the best Democratic candidate we've had since Bill Clinton. And that's coming from a Democrat."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Barack Obama

Par for Mr. Corsi

An expert at misrepresentation takes on Barack Obama.

Washington PostEditorialFriday, August 15, 2008

THERE'S A cottage industry in books about Barack Obama; by one count, more than 20 are just out or are in the works. But few debut in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, as Jerome R. Corsi's "The Obama Nation" will do among nonfiction hardcover titles this week. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, given his earlier hit job on the last Democratic nominee, Mr. Corsi's latest is rife with inaccuracies and innuendo. If the fundamental smear of "Unfit for Command" was that John F. Kerry was no war hero, the insinuation of Mr. Corsi's latest is that Mr. Obama is a closet Muslim and militant, black activist drug-user.

"The Obama Nation" -- the ungainly play on words (abomination, get it?) is "fully intended," the author tells us -- reprises the Corsi method. Mr. Corsi boasts that "I fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references" and asserts that "my fundamental opposition to Obama's presidential candidacy involves public policy differences." But footnoting to a discredited blog item does not constitute careful scholarship, and the bulk of Mr. Corsi's book has nothing to do with issues.

He gets facts wrong, from the date of Mr. Obama's marriage to whether he dedicated his autobiography to his family (he did) to whether he revealed that he took his future wife on his second trip to Kenya (he did.) He makes offensive statements: "The sexual attraction of his mother to her African husband jumps out from the page."

When facts are lacking, Mr. Corsi makes his point by suggestive questions. Noting that Life magazine could find no record of an article that Mr. Obama remembered reading as a child about a black man who tried to lighten his skin, Mr. Corsi asks, "How much more imagining, hypothetical lying, or just plain lying is Obama capable of doing?" When facts are present, he twists them to make Mr. Obama bad.

Mr. Corsi's discussion of Mr. Obama's drug use -- disclosed by Mr. Obama in his autobiography -- manages to combine a few of these techniques. "Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the U.S. Senate?" In fact, Mr. Obama has said that he stopped using drugs when he was 20. Mr. Corsi is similarly misleading about Mr. Obama's religious background, questioning his claim to be Christian. "Obama had to know that running for political office, even state office, would be much more difficult to do if voters suspected he was a Muslim," Corsi writes. "Yet once Obama became a member of Trinity, he had proof he was a Christian, as he professed to be."

Mr. Corsi has dismissed criticisms of his book as "nit-picking," an odd defense coming from an author happy to inflate any possible omission into a full-blown evasion. Mary Matalin, the Republican political strategist who heads Threshold Editions, the Simon and Schuster division that published "The Obama Nation," described the book to the New York Times as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." That would not be our description.

When political hacks edit books.

Jerome R. Corsi has written a book about Barack Obama cleverly titled The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. The book is published by Threshold Editions, Mary Matalin's imprint at Simon & Schuster. It "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book," Matalin sniffed to Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman of the New York Times. Rather, it is "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." Corsi holds a doctorate in government from Harvard University, and the book's cover highlights Corsi's academic credential with the byline "Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.d."

But Corsi, a staff reporter for the hard-right World Net Daily and co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, a 2004 hit job published by the hard-right Regnery, maintains his scholarly posture with some difficulty. In his off-hours, Corsi calls Arabs "ragheads" and Bill Clinton an "anti-American communist" on Internet message boards. Susan Estrich is "Susan Estrogen" and Katie Couric is "Little Katie Communist." In the past, Corsi's fellow conservative, Debbie Schlussel, has even accused Corsi of plagiarism (though, to be fair, this looks to me more like garden-variety theft, i.e., taking an idea and some facts from another columnist without extending the usual courtesy of a citation; a minor offense in journalism, if not in academia).

Why did Corsi write The Obama Nation? Was it in disinterested pursuit of scholarly truth? Er, not exactly. "The goal is to defeat Obama," he told the Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."

I haven't read The Obama Nation. But both the Times and Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog Web site (and the source of my above links to "ragheads," etc.), cite multiple errors in the book. Ordinarily, when an author or an editor discovers errors in a book's text, he or she arranges to correct them in the next printing. I've done this myself. But neither Corsi nor Matalin responded to e-mails from me asking whether they intended to correct any errors in The Obama Nation—it would be a miracle if there were none. In the Times, Corsi brushed aside the Media Matters critique because of its politics. Now, I yield to no one in my skepticism regarding the veracity of Media Matters' chief executive officer, the former right-wing hit man David Brock. But Media Matters operates on the principle of transparency, providing links and video clips necessary to assess its claims of falsehood. Sometimes the claims hold up; sometimes they seem like a reach. Most of its findings concerning The Obama Nation are unassailable. For instance, Obama either has or hasn't stated publicly when he stopped using marijuana and cocaine. According to Corsi, he hasn't. According to Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father he has. "I stopped getting high" when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, Obama writes. The Times further notes that in 2003, Obama told the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., in response to a question about drug use, "I haven't done anything since I was 20 years old." When the Times confronted Corsi with this information, he changed the subject from his book's obvious error to what he deems the unreliability of self-reporting on matters of drug use. Which, of course, was entirely beside the point.

All this raises the question of whether the world of "conservative" publishing, which includes not only Matalin's imprint at Simon & Schuster but also Random House's Crown Forum and Penguin Group USA's Sentinel, aspires even to the standards of the nonideological (or what conservatives call the "liberal") publishing establishment, which are nothing to write home about. What I've learned about The Obama Nation suggests it does not. What the hell is Mary Matalin doing running a publishing imprint in the first place? She is a professional propagandist, a political operative who learned her craft at the feet not of Maxwell Perkins but of Lee Atwater. Truth is not what she's about; campaigns are, and for Matalin, The Obama Nation would appear to be just another campaign. This isn't to say that, through her Threshold imprint, Matalin is subverting Simon & Schuster's pursuit of profit to partisan ends. Quite the contrary. Simon & Schuster and the other big publishing houses have started conservative imprints, at arms' length and with noses held, because they recognize them to be a gold mine. The Obama Nation, the Times reports, will debut on its best-seller list this Sunday at No. 1. But part of the deal, clearly, is that conservative imprints aren't required to adhere to the same standards of truth as the grown-up divisions. If an Erwin Glikes or even an Adam Bellow is available to edit your conservative fall list, fine. But in a pinch, a Mary Matalin will do. It's what George W. Bush memorably dubbed the soft bigotry of low expectations. The conservative movement has won the publishing houses' attention but not their respect. Does it even care?

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2197432/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Obamarama

Obama as Incumbent

Washington PostColumnistBy E. J. Dionne Jr.Monday, August 11, 2008

The core strategy of John McCain's campaign is to turn Barack Obama into the incumbent, the man who is too familiar yet still mysterious.

The effort reflects one of the most remarkable aspects of the 2008 campaign: Obama has turned himself into the central figure in American politics. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it comes at a price.

One cost was measured by a Pew Research Center study released last week that found that 48 percent of all those surveyed -- and 51 percent of the political independents -- said they had heard "too much" about Obama. Only 26 percent (and 28 percent of independents) said that about McCain.

This is understandable: From mid- to late-February until only the past week or so, Obama had received far more media attention than McCain, according to the Campaign Coverage Index produced by Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Obama's centrality has created an odd dynamic. The most important influences on the campaign are President Bush's unpopularity and the collapse of public sympathy for the Republican Party, meaning that a majority is inclined to vote for the Democratic nominee unless he is rendered unacceptable.

But with Bush fading into the background, McCain's campaign has been more about Obama than about himself. In recent weeks, McCain's advertising tossed one charge after another at the man painted serially as "the biggest celebrity in the world," "Dr. No" and "The One." McCain's attacks, which helped build Obama fatigue, continued over the weekend.

Yet Obama has absorbed the assaults and headed to his holiday in Hawaii holding an advantage of four to six percentage points -- roughly the same margin he has enjoyed all summer. This led political strategists in both parties with whom I spoke in recent days to challenge the conventional wisdom of an Obama campaign that is "underperforming."

Obama has been criticized for not responding quickly enough to the McCain offensive. But the past two weeks have solidified voters' perceptions, measured in recent polls, that the Republican campaign is far more negative than Obama's. This opens space for Obama to respond forcefully to McCain without being accused of initiating the attacks.

Moreover, a candidate who spends all his time defining his opponent has not spent much time defining himself. McCain is living off his maverick image. This has fed voter perceptions that he is moderate and independent, allowing him to run more competitively with Obama than any of McCain's primary opponents could have.

Despite McCain's longevity in the public eye, though, a CBS News poll last week found a third of voters still undecided in their opinion of McCain or saying they didn't know enough to form one. (Roughly the same proportion said this about Obama.)

This leaves room for Democrats to define McCain as a conventional conservative and a Bush supporter. And some Republicans wonder if McCain, by absorbing so many Bush operatives into his campaign, may have limited his maneuvering room to declare his independence from an unpopular president.

In the past two weeks, McCain has succeeded in narrowing the economic discussion to energy and oil drilling, forcing Obama to respond defensively. But "drill, drill, drill" is not a slogan that can carry McCain through November, given the range of the electorate's economic discontents.

There is a certain shrewdness to the McCain campaign's effort to turn Obama's strengths -- the energy he excites in crowds, the historic nature of his candidacy and the interest he has created overseas -- into weaknesses.

"They're trying to make lemonade out of a lemon," said one Democratic strategist who is not working for the Obama campaign. "It's not a bad thing to do, but it's a sign of weakness."

Thus the effort to turn Obama into the incumbent. McCain loses if the race becomes a referendum on Bush. He is running behind on most issues. And he has yet to generate the commitment among those who say they're for him that Obama has inspired among his own supporters.

The one contest McCain can win is an election about Obama. Paradoxically, Obama's imperative at his convention is to reassure voters about who he is while also moving the spotlight off himself.

postchat@aol.com

Political Wives Enabling Immoral Behavior

By Sally QuinnWashington Post Reporter

I just want to smack him across the puss, as my Savannah-born mother used to say. I want to smack him across that pretty puss, those pretty eyelashes, that pretty hair. I want to shake him and knock his pretty head against the wall.

At first that was all I could think of when I heard about John Edwards' confession. Because all the words about him had already been said. We've been through this so many times there's almost nothing left to say. Sure, they are all "lyin', cheatin', no-good hypocrites!" as the New York Post headline screamed. So what else is new?

The details are, of course, always different. In this case, Edwards says he wasn't in love with the other woman, it ended in 2006, the baby is not his, he told his wife every painful detail, she forgave him and anyway she was in remission from cancer so it wasn't really all that bad. Frankly, though, I don't see what John Edwards did as being that different from what any of the other men in power -- Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, etc. -- did. I don't see that the moral issues are all that different either. Like the others, Edwards and his wife pretended they were one big happy family, and like the others he lied to his family, the staff and the press. But we're all so cynical now that we don't believe a word they say and I think most Americans are so scandal fatigued that they just shrug them off.

Let's try to give John Edwards the benefit of the doubt for a moment. He lost a son in a tragic automobile accident. His wife developed breast cancer shortly before he lost the exhausting campaign for vice president. The cancer returned. It is inoperable. He has three children to whom he has to give moral support while his wife has been sick and he was running for president at his wife's insistence. That's a lot to deal with. I've had a number of friends die of cancer and often, discreetly, their spouses have turned to someone else for comfort and support, especially if the disease is drawn out. People have not judged them harshly. None of that excuses his behavior but at least it partially explains it. Even if he is a narcissistic, self centered, lyin', cheatin', no-good, hypocritical egomaniac which of course he is.

That, however is not what is interesting about this story. What is interesting here is Elizabeth Edwards.

This is the thing that is driving me crazy. The wives. The enabling wives. Nobody has more respect for Elizabeth Edwards than I do. First of all, any woman who has lost a child gets a pass for life from me. Nothing could be more horrible. Not only that, she is brilliant, clever, capable, decent and courageous. She has battled cancer, taken care of her family and been a loyal campaigner for her husband. The grief she has gone through, having lost a child and knowing she may leave her other three motherless must be unbearable.

The problem is, SHE LET HIM DO IT. She not only agreed to his run for the presidency, she encouraged him to do it, knowing the toll it would take on the family given her health problems. But, worse, she let him do it knowing that he had had an affair. What on earth was she thinking? She said in the Daily Kos, "This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well." I'm sorry but it was not a private matter. Not when you are running for president. The press would surely have left him alone had he not run. The mainstream press left him alone while he was running, but if he had won the primaries she had to know it surely would have come out. It always comes out. Repeat... it always comes out.

Not only did she allow him to run, exposing herself and her children to the pain and humiliation that would inevitably come, she could have allowed him to destroy the Democratic party in the process. This man was running for the President of the United States on a lie and she knew it. If he had not entered the race it could have changed the outcome of the primary. And what if he had won the primary? Think of the people they betrayed -- yes, THEY. They betrayed their devoted staff, the supporters who sent in millions of dollars, the taxpayers who supplied Secret Service protection (I want my money back) , their party and their country. She stood by and let him lie and lie and lie.

This simply can't go on. These women, these political spouses have to stop enabling their husbands to behave like this. Because as long as they do the men will continue to cheat, lie and betray. As long as they believe there will be no consequences (and by their wives tacit support they begin to believe it), what is there to stop them?

This kind of thing hurts everybody. Most importantly it hurts women. It paints all of us as pathetic victims, or potential ones in any case. Every time one of these guys goes off the reservation it creates the perception that it's OK, that that's what men do and the women should just shut up, put on a brave face and support them.

Yes, I want to smack John Edwards across the puss. But more than that I want Elizabeth Edwards to do it for me. Not just for me but for all of us.

Washington Post journalist, author and Washington DC insider, Sally Quinn founded and co-moderates On Faith, a blog from the Washington Post and Newsweek. Co-moderated by Newsweek editor and bestselling author Jon Meacham and hosted by a panel of renowned religious scholars of all denominations, On Faith is the first worldwide, interactive discussion about religion and its impact on global life.

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning

July 27, 2008New York TimesOP-ED COLUMNISTBy MAUREEN DOWDLONDON

It could have been a French movie.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.

Sarko is right and Barack is left. One had a Jewish grandfather, the other a Muslim one. The French president is a frenetic bumper car; the Illinois senator is, as he said of the king of Jordan’s Mercedes 600, “a smooth ride.”

But the son of a Hungarian, who picked a lock to break into the French ruling class, embraced a fellow outsider and child of an immigrant who had also busted into the political aristocracy with a foreign-sounding name.

After 200,000 people thronged to see Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin, christening him “Redeemer” and “Savior,” it turned out Sarko was also Obamarized, as the Germans were calling the mesmerizing effect.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.

He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”

“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”

How do you go back to the Iowa farm after you’ve seen Paree?

“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”

I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.

“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg.”

He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations liking the American president, because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”

How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as “The One”?

“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”

Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp.

A private prayer he left in the holy Western Wall in Jerusalem was snatched out by a student at a Jewish seminary and published in a local newspaper. In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”

Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”

I ask him if he found it a bit creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like “fabric softener with spring scent.”

He looked nonplused: “Did she describe what my T-shirt smelled like?”

Being a Citizen of the World has its downsides.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Barack, Here's How to Get the White People

By Jack WhiteTheRoot.comJune 25, 2008

A nine-point plan for winning over white voters—and the election.

Is America ready to elect a black president? We'll find out in November. Barack Obama's candidacy poses an unprecedented sociological experiment. Everything about us, including how far we've come toward the creation of the more perfect union in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, will be put to the test. And everything about Obama will be put to the test as well, including his ability to forge a winning political strategy.

The sad but unavoidable reality is that race is likely to play a pivotal role in this experiment. If Obama were a generic white, male Democrat of similar eloquence, youthful grace and energy, he would be a guaranteed easy landslide victor over the standard bearer for a party as deeply unpopular as the Republicans have become. As Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University told Politico.com, "It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II."

Obama is ahead of John McCain by 15 points in one recent poll, but that's no cause for overconfidence: In 1988, Michael Dukakis had a similar advantage at a comparable point in the race, but wound up a loser to the first George Bush. Other surveys show Obama with only a six-point lead over McCain— a narrow margin that many white analysts seem to be going out of their way to attribute to every factor but the most obvious one, his ethnicity. White commentators may not want to talk about it, but race—not Obama's relatively short resume, or the resentment of Hillary Clinton's feminist supporters or McCain's increasingly obsolete image as a maverick—is the biggest obstacle between Obama and the White House.

That means that despite his lock on the black vote and his popularity among the young and highly educated, Obama must add enough whites to his coalition to win in the electoral college. He need not garner a majority of such voters—no Democrat, including Bill Clinton, has since 1964—but he needs enough of them to win. Can he do it? Yes, he can, with the right strategy. Here's my unsolicited nine-point plan to Obama for winning over white voters and victory in the fall campaign:

1) Remind us who you are. Hire Spike Lee to produce a one-hour story of your life, emphasizing your mother's Midwestern roots, your grandfather's and great-uncle's service in World War II, your climb through excellence to Harvard Law School and your time as a community organizer in Chicago. Include great footage of helping your daughters with their homework and of your participation in pick-up basketball games. The objective is to show that yours is a truly American story of patriotism, hard work and achievement that makes people feel that if you can make it, they can, too. Put it on all the networks before your acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention on August 28.

2) Keep it simple and sunny. The last time we faced an election as pivotal as this was 1980, when Ronald Reagan used his optimistic personality and a simple but powerful message to wrest the presidency from the hapless Jimmy Carter and usher in a conservatism that would dominate American politics for a generation. You have the potential to accomplish a similar re-alignment for your own brand of post-partisan pragmatic liberalism by recycling a few pages from Reagan's play book. Ask voters if they are better off than they were eight years ago. Promise them that we can rebuild the economy if we stop wasting lives and treasury on unnecessary wars and focus on renewing the infrastructure, finding new energy sources and coping with global warming. Don't get bogged down in details about new policy ideas.

3) Go to church every Sunday. This is the best way to combat the rumors that you are a secret Muslim and neutralize the damage from your ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Make sure the congregations are racially mixed. Keep meeting with evangelical leaders to let them know that you are a Democrat who understands their values and shares their belief in Jesus Christ.

4) Re-channel RFK. Use your powerful oratory to revive the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, when blacks and whites united in the cause of racial equality. Ignore the segment of white voters who will never vote for a black candidate under any circumstances. Concentrate, instead, on those who can be persuaded that you offer a better future for everybody by retracing Robert F. Kennedy's visits to in Appalachia, Indian reservations, ghettos and barrios, reminding all of us how much more must still be done to make the American dream real for everyone.

5) Be nice to McCain. Treat him the way you treated the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." Call him "sir," when you debate him—which you should do whenever you can. Point out how closely he has tied himself to the failed policies of the Bush administration, but do it with respect and genuine admiration. Smile at him. This will help create the post-partisan atmosphere you'll need to accomplish anything once you get elected.

6) Show off your team. You've got a diverse group of really smart advisors. Make sure voters know that by putting them in the spotlight. Keep letting reporters into your sessions with your economic and foreign policy team, as you did a few days ago, to see how you operate. Let them float innovative new policy ideas while you focus on the big picture. Let voters see that you are smart and confident enough to let yourself be guided by folks who are even smarter.

7) Avoid Washington insiders. You did the right thing by quickly accepting the resignation of Jim Johnson from your vice-presidential vetting team, but you should never have put him on the team in the first place. Inevitably you have to include crafty Washington veterans in your campaign cabinet, but keep them at a minimum. Voters need to know that you are serious about change, and the best way to reinforce that message is to surround yourself with advisors who look like the new America you are trying to create.

8) Talk tough to your supporters, including blacks and liberals. Your Father's Day speech on absentee black dads was a masterstroke. It not only won applause from blacks but showed skeptical whites that you understand their feelings about race even if you don't necessarily agree with them. Follow up by re-iterating your skepticism about paying reparations for slavery and your doubts about race-based affirmative action policies. This will help to demonstrate that you intend to be a president for everybody, not just blacks. By the same reasoning, stand up to your supporters from Moveon.com, by sticking to your support for the compromise Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which protects telephone companies that cooperated with government intelligence agencies from lawsuits. The law sucks, but you can change it if you're elected. Meanwhile, there's no reason to give Republicans an excuse for charging you with being soft on terrorists.

9) Go to the front lines. Pay a visit to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan before the convention to get a first-hand look at how the wars are going. Pay visits to veterans' hospitals and propose big improvements in the way our soldiers are treated. Like putting that flag pin back in your lapel, these steps will help to burnish your patriotism and foreign policy credentials. If you are going to be commander-in-chief, you have to act like one.

There are, of course, lots of other things that you can do to improve your chances in November, and you're already doing some of them. But none of them may be as important, in the end, as something we blacks can do for you. We have to let you have the freedom to run as a candidate for all the people, not just us. If we try to turn your campaign into a black thing that whites don't understand, you won't make it and the country will be stuck with four more years of disastrous policies. This is a case in which we have to put America's interests ahead of our own, by letting you do whatever you need to do to win. Go for it! Yes, you can.

Jack White teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Obama Organizers Meet On Saturday, July 26, just 100 days from November 4th Election

The general election is coming up sooner than you may think. This Saturday, July 26th, is just 100 days from November 4th.

Right now, Senator Obama is on an important trip to Europe and the Middle East where, as president, he will work to restore America's strength in the world. He has spent recent days visiting our troops and meeting with leaders in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations.

Here in Florida, we have some important work to do as well.

This Saturday, July 26th, supporters are joining together at Campaign for Change organizational meetings across the state.

These meetings are an important chance to meet campaign organizers, community leaders, and other Obama supporters in your area. Together, we'll discuss our strategy for building this movement for change in Florida.

Sign up to attend an organizational meeting this Saturday:

http://fl.barackobama.com/FLorgmeeting

Since we're only 100 days from the general election, we can't afford to sit on the sidelines -- we have to start now.

Saturday's organizational meetings are an opportunity to meet fellow Obama supporters in your community and learn about a crucial part of our strategy here -- our new Florida Neighborhood Teams for Change program.

The Florida Neighborhood Teams for Change program is a fun and easy way to turn your commitment to our Campaign for Change into action that will help turn Florida blue in November. Teams will be responsible for reaching out to friends, neighbors, and undecided voters to spread the word about this movement.

No political experience is required. We'll provide you with everything you need, every step of the way.

Join us this Saturday at an organizational meeting in your county:

http://fl.barackobama.com/FLorgmeeting

Thank you,

Jackie

Jackie LeeFlorida General Election DirectorCampaign for Change

P.S. -- Want to learn more about programs in Florida?

The Obama Florida homepage is the best resource to stay up-to-date about events and activities in your area. Bookmark the page in your web browser, visit often, and make sure to pass the word to your family and friends:

http://fl.barackobama.com

Michelle Obama Attacked by Fox Television

Michelle Obama

Sign The Petition foxattacks.com/michelle

I'm sure many of you have seen and/or heard FOX's racist and sexist attacks against Michelle Obama. Brave New Films has a video describing these attacks and a petition to demand that FOX stop attacking Michelle Obama. Please sign the petition and pass both it and the video around.

You can watch the video here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ_kR8nP1Tc

You can sign the petition here.http://foxattacks.com/michelle

The Obama Agenda

June 30, 2008New York TimesOp-Ed ColumnistBy PAUL KRUGMAN

It’s feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It’s also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country’s direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?

Current polls — not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood — are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction.

So the odds are that this will be a “change” election — which means that it’s very much Mr. Obama’s election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?

Reagan, for better or worse — I’d say for worse, but that’s another discussion — brought a lot of change. He ran as an unabashed conservative, with a clear ideological agenda. And he had enormous success in getting that agenda implemented. He had his failures, most notably on Social Security, which he tried to dismantle but ended up strengthening. But America at the end of the Reagan years was not the same country it was when he took office.

Bill Clinton also ran as a candidate of change, but it was much less clear what kind of change he was offering. He portrayed himself as someone who transcended the traditional liberal-conservative divide, proposing “a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement.” The economic plan he announced during the campaign was something of a hodgepodge: higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes for the middle class, public investment in things like high-speed rail, health care reform without specifics.

We all know what happened next. The Clinton administration achieved a number of significant successes, from the revitalization of veterans’ health care and federal emergency management to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and health insurance for children. But the big picture is summed up by the title of a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz: “The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008.”

Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama portrays himself as transcending traditional divides. Near the end of last week’s “unity” event with Hillary Clinton, he declared that “the choice in this election is not between left or right, it’s not between liberal or conservative, it’s between the past and the future.” Oh-kay.

Mr. Obama’s economic plan also looks remarkably like the Clinton 1992 plan: a mixture of higher taxes on the rich, tax breaks for the middle class and public investment (this time with a focus on alternative energy).

Sometimes the Clinton-Obama echoes are almost scary. During his speech accepting the nomination, Mr. Clinton led the audience in a chant of “We can do it!” Remind you of anything?

Just to be clear, we could — and still might — do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more.

Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.

They may have had it backward.

Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration’s behest.

The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.

In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.

One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country’s direction. And that’s mainly up to Mr. Obama.

Senator Obama And Telecom Immunity Legislation

By Clayton Woullard

Before we get too riled up about Barack supporting the telecom immunity bill, let's keep in mind what else the bill does and put it in context with a statement from his campaign:

(Posted on Huffingtonpost.com):

Sen. Barack Obama's campaign released a statement Friday afternoon saying that while Obama opposes amnesty for telecom firms that spied on Americans, he will support the House compromise legislation.

The statement in full:

"Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.

"That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.

"After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act.

"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

"It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives - and the liberty - of the American people."

I think we need to keep in mind the conditions under which Democrats are trying to get things done and that compromise is a necessity in politics. Compromise is also a quality of Barack's that will be fundamental in getting him elected as president.

Goodbye to a Standup Brother

Tim Russert was a rarity in Washington; when he said he wanted to understand other people, he meant it.

TheRoot.com

June 15, 2008--Here is something important you need to know about Tim Russert: On the night Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, even a casual viewer could tell Tim was beside himself with the joy of watching history unfold before his eyes. In that slightly over the top, nearly hokey way that characterized his love of election nights, he simply could not get enough.

I was watching at home, enough of a political junkie myself to know I had to hang in there to see the history being made, but fighting off sleep all the same. And then my friend Tim said something on the air that made me wish I'd said it first.

"I was thinking: What would I like to do tomorrow?" he said to the camera, his face shiny with excitement. "No more primaries to cover! One, I'd like to be in that meeting between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But absent that, I would LOVE to teach American history in an inner-city American school tomorrow morning. How GREAT would that be? Just to look in those faces and listen to those kids—what they witnessed and saw tonight."

I knew he meant every word.

Tim loved a lot of things, a lot of people. And we loved him right back. He hired me at NBC in 1994 on a dare, luring me from my comfy perch at the New York Times with a promise to teach me TV. His reasoning was simple; it was a better bet to teach a good reporter about television than to try to teach a TV-ready talking head about how to be a journalist. His own example was his guide. He took over Meet the Press in 1991 without a lick of television experience, but with a wealth of political knowledge.

He never had to say it, but I also know Tim considered it a bonus that, by hiring me, he was going to be able to add an African-American voice to his Washington bureau—someone who could keep up with him on politics but also tell him stuff he didn't know. He was keenly aware that, as proud as he was of his Irish Catholic, blue-collar roots, other people had different roots that they were equally proud of and that understanding those varied views of the world was important.

I was working for him at NBC during the 1995 Million Man March. As hundreds of thousands of men streamed onto the National Mall, he knew this was a big deal, and he knew there was something he could learn if he would just dig deeply enough. So he assembled a roundtable for that week's Meet the Press unlike anything Sunday morning had ever seen: all black men, including liberal Jesse Jackson and conservative Robert Woodson, Tim and me. It was no stunt. Tim really wanted to understand the significance of the event.

That kind of sincere interest is rare. Many powerful white men limit their curiosity to confirming what they already believe they know to be true. When Tim did not know something, he found someone who did. Over the years, he found me, and NPR's Michele Norris, and the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson and CNN's Suzanne Malveaux and Joe Johns and other voices who could clue him in to how black folk thought, talked, acted—and to help him understand why there was no monolithic answer. When the National Urban League scolded him and other Sunday morning shows about lack of diversity on their roundtables, he showed up at the meeting himself to talk to them about how to address the problem.

I made my last appearance with him on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. We were talking about race in the context of this year's presidential contest and another panelist, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, remarked that race was a subject that made white folks queasy. I countered that black folks only get queasy talking about race when they are in conversation with white folks who get queasy talking about it. Tim's eyes twinkled when he looked at me. He absolutely loved that I was telling him something he had not thought of before.

I never minded talking about race with Tim because he was never queasy talking about it with me.

There is quite a line of people who, at various times, have taken credit for my career. I usually let them do it, even if I remember events quite differently. But Tim deserves the credit. He not only talked me into switching to TV against my first instincts, but—five years later—he engineered a way for me to leave NBC when I was offered the chance to become the first African American to host a weekly public affairs program, Washington Week, over on PBS. He not only talked NBC executives into getting me out of my contract, but he also looked me in the eye and told me this was something I absolutely, positively had to do.

Tim remained a friend to the end. Even when we disagreed—as happened during the infamous Don Imus episode last year—he never stopped wanting to hear what I thought. Imus was his friend, and he had appeared on the radio show many, many times. So when Meet the Press producer Betsy Fischer called to invite me to participate in a Sunday roundtable focused on the controversy, I at first refused.

I felt compelled to call Tim and explain. If I come on your show, I told him, I will be forced to criticize the journalists who had enabled Imus over the years, leading up to his stunning insult of the Rutgers basketball team. Tim knew—and I knew—that Imus had insulted me too, years before. When I told Tim I didn't feel I could come to his house and insult him, he quickly assured me that he wanted me to come and say what I had to say. People needed to hear it, he told me.

So I went, and I told him to his face that I found his defense of Imus disappointing. I got a lot of kudos for speaking truth to power that day, but the real news was that Tim allowed me to say what I had to say, knowing it would not make him look good. That does not happen a lot—in life or politics.

I am stunned and grief-stricken by Tim's death. In a world where many of us realize we are the only black friends our white friends have, I remember Tim as a guy who considered it a thrill to drop by my house, grab the first baby who wandered by in a house full of mostly black people, and work the room like he never wanted to leave.

Now that, right there, was my brother.

Gwen Ifill is host of ''Washington Week'' on PBS.

Senate Should Stop Confirming Bush's Appointment of Judges

Dear Friend,

Thanks to seven years of Bush's ultra-conservative appointments to the courts, the federal judiciary has been shifted far to the right. Now that his presidency is -- finally -- almost over, it's time for the Senate to stop confirming ANY of his judicial nominees.

Let's tell Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that he should shut down the judicial confirmations process until a new president is sworn in next January.

I hope you'll have a look and take action. http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/no_more_bush_judges/?r_by=-1661028-wou2.c&rc=mailto

Obama Speaks to His National Staff in Chicago After Winning

Obama returned to Chicago last week to address his enthusiastic staff. From the video link below, you will hear what he told them. One of these days I will learn how to download the video onto these pages. Until then.....click below.

Fox News Wants To Know If This Is A "Hezbollah" Terrorist Signal

Michelle Tells Barack "I Got Your Back"

ON BARACK OBAMA: Andy Goodman's Ghost

By Danny Lyonbleakbeauty.comApril 27, 2008

Five years ago I was having dinner with a group of students in a bar in Carbondale, Illinois. As we left I saw five men seated at a back table. Waiting for them as they got up to leave, I stopped the tall and handsome man. It was Barack Obama, then campaigning for the Democratic nomination for Senator from Illinois. He stooped and listened patiently as I told him that Julian Bond was a good friend of mine, that I had photographed the civil rights movement, and that my daughter, Gabrielle, was an activist in Chicago, and my son in law, Dr. Paul Sereno, was also on the University of Chicago faculty where Obama had taught constitutional law.

Obama lives in Hyde Park, Chicago, the neighborhood I left to join SNCC 46 years ago. When he began his run for the Presidency of the United States, I sent him my civil rights book and wrote across the opening page, “The hopes and dreams of untold thousands rest with you”. I wanted to write “millions”.

When I was nineteen and a college student in Chicago, the first reports of the American civil rights movement were reaching me. I read that Martin Luther King was in jail in Georgia. I had no car and no idea of how to get there. In 1962, in my third year as a history student at the University of Chicago, I talked with a fellow student, a white Jewish woman who had been arrested in a demonstration in the South. It was my first contact with the black rebellion that was slowly growing in the southern states. That year I was twenty years old. Segregation, or aparthied, was the law of the land in thirteen American states. With contact information from my fellow student, I hitchhiked south, first to southern Illinois where I met John Lewis, who is now a congressmen and still one of my oldest friends.

Within a week I had reached the deep south in Georgia, was thrown into jail, and looked through the bars across to the Negro section of the jail to watch Martin Luther King being served a special lunch of chicken on a red and white checkered tablecloth and being examined by a doctor. I had managed to reach the southern civil rights movement about one year before it was recognized as a major story by the press. The word “media” was not used in 1962.

Now I am sixty -six and there are two things I like to tell people of my life. One is that I was in jail with Martin Luther King, the other is that I spent four days alone with Muhammad Ali in 1973 just before the second Jerry Quarry fight. Ali is like King, an American great. In 1968 Ali did something that is almost unheard of in our society. He put principles before money and refused to fight in Vietnam. “No Vietcong ever called me Nigger” is as good a line as many that Jefferson wrote, and Muhammad Ali did not go to college.

Any one that experienced segregation in the South, cannot help but jump when he sees a black family being served in a white restaurant in Mississippi. I will never get used to it. I saw too many people thrown through windows, knocked down, beaten up and arrested over and over to ever take this simple event for granted. Nor will I ever feel safe driving down a dark southern highway at night, all alone, because I know of young people that were in the Movement and were murdered as they drove down those roads at night.

As I write this Obama is about to become the 44th President of the United States. The office created for George Washington, a holder of hundreds of African slaves. An office elevated by Abraham Lincoln who wrote very clearly that the black person would never be equal to the white person, and thought sending the slaves back to Africa was the best way to deal with the problem. Of course it was James Baldwin who pointed out that “the problem” was something white people had, not blacks.

Obama’s campaign, in fact the whole phenomenon of his candidacy, is a page torn out of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and is the direct result of the events that occurred in the deep south forty six years ago. The grass roots uprising that I joined in 1962 was called the movement, with a small “m” and within two years I published a book called The Movement, with a capital M. That is what media people do. They take reality and sell it to the public. The entire idea of the leader that does not lead is straight from the life of Bob Moses, the NYC math teacher that led the rebellion in Mississippi and lead the successful fight to secure the right for blacks to vote in that state and across the South. When Hillary stupidly said that President Johnson secured the right to vote by signing the voting rights act in 1967, she insulted a lot of people. The people that won the right to vote in the South were the young people, mostly black, that put their lives on the line and created the pressure that made the voting rights act possible. When the Klan gathered in Mississippi to murder three voter registration workers, one of them was a black boy from Mississippi and the other two were Jewish boys from New York City. So the Obama candidacy has taken the tactics of the Movement, of grass roots organizing, of the “leader that does not lead” and used it successfully in a run for the Presidency.

Just participating in the black rebellion in the South in the early 1960’s was a victory. You didn’t have to win every battle because the biggest battle was overcoming your and your family’s fear to join the movement. Obama’s candidacy is in itself a huge victory. It shows that the media’s constant refrain that Americans all hate each other and that we are a deeply racist society is simply not true.

As the author of many books of journalism and films using pictures and words, I have devoted my life to creating an honest picture of America, almost always in direct opposition to the false world that seems to so naturally come from the Media. Can you change society? Can you change Americans? Can you even see or recognize change? If you live long enough and get old enough, you can see change. You can see it now. The real people that created this wonderful moment in American and world history aren’t the thousands of young people that have worked so hard organizing Obama’s victories. The people that created this moment are now in their sixties and older and worked for this moment when they were young and some that worked for it their whole lives.

I am not much for TV pundits, but one of them, on CNBC, commenting on Obama’s startling victory in Iowa, said something that made me jump and deserves repeating. He talked of the myriad problems of America and how the world and many people have come to view the United States. “Its almost as if he were sent by God,” he said. I agree.

Danny Lyon, April 27, 2008

Is Obama An Enlightened Being?

I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?

I, of course, have an answer. Sort of.

Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.

Ready? It goes likes this:

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.

Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.

Let me be completely clear: I'm not arguing some sort of utopian revolution, a big global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie camp counselor. I'm not saying the man's going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.

Please. I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual. While Obama's certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn't hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.

Not this time.

Democratic Primary Boosts U.S. Image Around the World

LONDON, June 4 -- For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States, at a time when the nation's image abroad has been seriously damaged.From hundreds of supporters crowded around televisions in rural Kenya, Obama's ancestral homeland, to jubilant Britons writing "WE DID IT!" on the "Brits for Barack" site on Facebook, people celebrated what they called an important racial and generational milestone for the United States.

"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."

The primary elections generated unprecedented interest around the world, as people in distant parliament buildings and thatched-roof huts followed the political ups and downs as if they were watching a Hollywood thriller.

Much of the interest simply reflects hunger for change from President Bush, who is deeply unpopular in much of the world. At the same time, many people abroad seemed impressed -- sometimes even shocked -- by the wide-open nature of U.S. democracy and the history-making race between a woman and a black man.

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

"I think it will be put down as a shining, historical moment in the history of America," said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor at Tokyo University.

While Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has admirers around the world, especially from her days as first lady, interviews on four continents suggested that Obama's candidacy has most captured the world's imagination."Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank. "We have immensely enjoyed the ride and can't wait for the next phase."

The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, who has extensive overseas experience, is known and respected in much of the world. In interviews, McCain seemed more popular than Obama in countries such as Israel, where McCain is particularly admired for his hard line against Iran. In China, leaders have enjoyed comfortable relations with Bush and are widely believed to be wary of a Democratic administration."Although no one will admit it, Israeli leaders are worried about Obama," said Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "The feeling is that this is the time to be tough in foreign policy toward the Middle East, and he's going to be soft."

But elsewhere, people were praising Obama, 46, whose heavy emphasis on the Internet helped make him better known in more nations than perhaps any U.S. primary candidate in history.

In Kenya, Obama's victory was greeted with unvarnished glee. In Kisumu, close to the home of Obama's late father, hundreds crowded around televisions to watch Obama's victory speech Wednesday morning, chanting "Obama tosha!" which translates as, "Obama is enough!"

"Our fortunes as the people of Kenya are certain to change. Obama knows our problems and I'm sure he has them at heart," said Salim Onyango, 32, a shoe shiner in Kisumu. "When he becomes president, he will definitely put in place support for us in Kenya."

Sam Onyango, a water vender in Kisumu, said: "Obama's victory means I might one day get to America and share the dreams I have always heard about. He will open doors for us there in the spirit of African brotherhood."

Obama also has strong support in Europe, the heartland of anti-Bush sentiment. "Germany is Obama country," said Karsten Voight, the German government's coordinator for German-North American cooperation. "He seems to strike a chord with average Germans," who see him as a transformational figure such as John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.

Despite his Harvard Law School degree and comparisons to historical greats, Obama is an accessible and familiar figure for millions of people, particularly in poor nations.

His father's journey to America as a Kenyan immigrant resonates with millions of migrants. Many people interviewed said that the son's living in Indonesia for several years as a child doesn't qualify as foreign policy credentials, but it may give him a more instinctive feel for the plight of the developing world."He's African, he's an immigrant family; he has a different style. It's just the way he looks -- he seems kind," said Nagy Kayed, 30, a student at the American University in Cairo.

For many, Obama's skin color is deeply symbolic. As the son of an African and a white woman from Kansas, Obama has the brownish "everyman" skin color shared by hundreds of millions of people.

"He looks like Egyptians. You can walk in the streets and find people who really look like him," said Manar el-Shorbagi, a specialist in U.S. political affairs at the American University in Cairo.

In many nations, Obama's youth and skin color also represent a welcome generational and stylistic change for America. Obama personifies not the America of Bush and Vice President Cheney but the nation that produced Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods -- youthful, dark-skinned sports stars who are deeply admired household names around the world.

"It could help to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment and even turn it around because of what he represents," said Kim Sung-ho, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.

"For an African American candidate to compete and perhaps win a presidential election is a strong reason for people in Asia to reconnect with the U.S.," Kim said. "This is such a contrast to the image of the United States as presented through its wars in Iraq and Vietnam."In terms of foreign policy, Obama's stated willingness to meet and talk with the leaders of Iran, Syria and other nations largely shunned by the Bush administration has been both praised and criticized overseas.

In Israel, Gilboa said Obama's openness to negotiating with Iran and Syria has contributed to the sense that his Middle East policies are too soft. When a leader of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that the United States considers to be a terrorist group, expressed a preference for Obama earlier this year, that turned off many Israelis even more.

Many in Israel said they would have preferred Clinton, who is well regarded because of her support for the Jewish state in the Senate and her husband's staunchly pro-Israel positions during his presidency.Obama's candidacy has generated suspicion among Palestinians as well.

Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Birzeit University, said that even if Obama appears to be even-handed in his approach to the Middle East, he would never take on the pro-Israel lobby in Washington."The minute that Obama takes office, if he takes office, all his aides in the White House will start working on his reelection," Jarbawi said. "Do you think Obama would risk his reelection because of us?"In Iran, government officials have taken no official position on the U.S. race, but several people interviewed said the government and average Iranians would welcome Obama and direct talks between Tehran and Washington.

"The majority of Iranians feel that the Democrats support what they want: a major and drastic change in relations with the U.S. So for them, the coming of Obama would be a good omen," said Hermidas Bavand, professor of U.S.-Iranian relations at the Allameh Tabatabai University.

In Latin America, Obama's recent declaration that he would meet with Presidents Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Raúl Castro of Cuba has been widely welcomed as a break from Bush policy.

Obama, though, has pointedly declared that he is not an admirer of Chávez. He recently voiced strong support for Colombia in its fight against its main rebel group, which Colombian officials say receives sanctuary from Chávez.

Those comments were welcomed in Colombia, which has had the closest ties in the region to the Bush administration. Though Colombian officials worry Obama will not support a free trade agreement with their country, Obama strikes a chord with ordinary Colombians because of deep resentments toward the Bush administration's policies, including the Iraq war."My No. 1 wish is that Bush be gone," said Salud Hernandez, a popular radio pundit in Bogota. An Obama presidency, she said, would be "a positive turn because of what Bush represented to the world."

Still, not everyone has been riveted by the U.S. election.

The Chinese public, absorbed by the recent earthquake in Sichuan province and preparations for the Beijing Olympics in August, paid little attention.

Chinese officials, while abstaining from comment on politics in another country, were probably watching the contest closely, aware that a Democratic administration in Washington would be more likely than the Bush administration to heed calls in Congress for protectionist measures against China's large trade surplus.

And Russians have proven supremely indifferent to the U.S. primaries; one poll earlier this year found that only 5 percent of Russians said they were closely watching the race. Of 40 people approached on the streets of Moscow Wednesday, only five had any opinion on the race or knew who was running.

Still, some Russians hope that a new American president will improve the strained relations between Washington and Moscow, where last month Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old protégé of former president Vladimir Putin, was sworn in as president.

"Barack Obama looks like the candidate that can be expected to take the greatest strides toward Russia," Konstantin Kosachev, a member of parliament, wrote in the newspaper Kommersant. "Unlike McCain, he's not infected with any Cold War phobias."

Contributing to this article were correspondents Ellen Knickmeyer in Cairo; Blaine Harden in Tokyo; Stephanie McCrummen in El Fashir, Darfur; Griff Witte in Jerusalem; Peter Finn in Moscow; Monte Reel in Buenos Aires; Juan Forero in Bogota; Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi; Edward Cody in Beijing and Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran and special correspondents Karla Adam in London, Shannon Smiley in Berlin, Akiko Yamamoto in Tokyo, Stella Kim in Seoul, Allan Akombo in Kisumu, Kenya, and Samuel Sockol and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem.

Obama's Patriotic Call

By E. J. Dionne Jr.Washington Post May 27, 2008

If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on.

Ever since Barack Obama took off his flag pin, Democrats and liberals have had a queasy feeling that talk of patriotism would be a covert way to raise the matter of Obama's race; to cast him as some sort of alien figure ("You know what his middle name is?"); and to paint him as an effete intellectual out of touch with true American values.

I have no doubt that these things will happen. Moreover, John McCain's sacrifice for his country will be a central theme of the Republican campaign. And why not? Yes, many Republicans refused to honor John Kerry's service during the campaign four years ago, but McCain wasn't part of that, and his service deserves the praise it gets.

Yet Obama cannot simply cede the terrain of patriotism to McCain, and progressives should not assume that patriotism is somehow a bad thing, akin to jingoism or nationalism.

The reaction of too many progressives to patriotism is "automatic, allergic recoil," say two young Seattle writers, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, in their important book "The True Patriot."

Instead of recoil, they offer rigorous standards for what patriotism should be. "True patriots," they write, "believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice; freedom from tolerance is prejudice; freedom from stewardship is exploitation; and freedom from compassion is cruelty."

Their new progressive patriotism bears some resemblance to the old progressive patriotism of Theodore Roosevelt. "We cannot meet the future," Roosevelt said in a 1916 Memorial Day speech, "either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all, we cannot meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by silly sentimentalism in words."

For good measure, the trust-buster also declared that "the big business man" must "recognize the fact that his business activities, while beneficial to himself and his associates, must also justify themselves by being beneficial to the men who work for him and to the public which he serves."

As Liu and Hanauer and and Roosevelt suggest, anyone who enters into a serious discussion of patriotism is required to offer more than bromides about love of flag and of country. Patriotism has to involve definitions, commitments and actions.

Obama already has the template for moving the debate in this direction. In December, he gave one of his best, and least noticed, speeches: a call to national service. The policies he proposed include a doubling of the Peace Corps and an expansion of the AmeriCorps program from 75,000 to 250,000 slots. (President Bush, by the way, deserves credit for saving AmeriCorps from the hostility of some in his own party.) Obama would link his $4,000 tuition tax credit to a service requirement.

He also suggests ideas that conservatives should embrace, including a Social Investment Fund Network and a Social Entrepreneur Agency that would encourage the innovations of the private, not-for-profit sector.

But Obama's speech was about more than programs. It was suffused with the rhetoric of a reformer's patriotism. "I have no doubt that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it," he said. "Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July; loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it."

Obama's is just one approach to patriotism and service. Sen. Jim Webb's new GI Bill of Rights is an essential step toward honoring those who have sacrificed in Iraq, and Sen. Chris Dodd has proposed important interim steps toward expanding AmeriCorps by bringing its rewards to those who perform service more closely in line with current college costs.

Dodd says he always explains his decision to join President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps by saying, "The president asked me." He wins nods from youthful audiences when he says, "Let me tell you what it was like to be young, to be an American and to be asked."

Dodd was campaigning for Obama in South Dakota last Friday when he spoke with me, and he seems to have gotten this message to his candidate. Pinch-hitting for Ted Kennedy as the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University on Sunday, Obama revisited the themes of his December speech and explicitly renewed JFK's call, promising that "service to a greater good" would be "a cause of my presidency."

A competition between Obama and McCain over who can issue the most compelling summons to service would serve the country far better than an empty rhetorical skirmish over which of these candidates is the true patriot. And, yes, it's a good thing that Obama has been seen wearing the flag pin again.

postchat@aol.com

Senator Obama calls on Wesleyan University graduates to enter public service

When Senator Edward Kennedy had to cancel his commencement speech at Wesleyan University, he asked Senator Barack Obama to stand in for him. Obama praised Kennedy, and when he said that Kennedy is "not finished yet," Kennedy's son cried. Obama said when he is President, he will creat a national service program for young people like the Wesleyan graduates.

Log on and see this inspiring speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX5WEgqw6pM

The Persistence of Racism and Barack Obama

By Mario Marcel Salas

We are far away from a "post racial society." Look at the political map of the election in West Virginia and Kentucky. Uneducated working class whites were easily duped by the race card that Hillary played. Racism still finds its home with the ignorant and uneducated. Many hard hat working class whites are still swayed by racist tactics. Even though the de jure status of segregation and overt racism are now illegal the racism amongst us is still quite evident. The Katrina disaster in New Orleans is but one example of the racism that lies just below the surface and is rekindled during a crisis. The messages of racism are now coded script, or masked so that its hatreds can be perpetuated on hate radio and the likes. Racism has made an adjustment; it is now "colorblind," using the words of Professor Eduardo Bonilla Silva in his book "Racism Without Racists."

One has to understand that this society and the foundations of the political structures in this country were founded upon a racial birth disorder. The white colonial settlers founded this country on the ideological premise of "manifest destiny," and hence the genocide of the native population. This genocide coincided with the introduction of African slavery and the institutionalization of the rules of racial etiquette that are still working in the background. Obama is not supposed to be running for president by the rules established and practiced by de facto racism. Whenever possible they will go after him with everything in the racial play book to prevent him from winning. The racist ideas that once held sway in the minds of most white Americans has diminished to be sure, but has not disappeared. I teach political science, and every semester I teach I make it a point to ask students if they have heard friends or relatives make racial remarks that made them feel uneasy. Generally, 70-90% of the class responds in the affirmative. Whites tell me that they have friends or relatives that "hate blacks," and the African American and Hispanic students tell me that they have experienced racial profiling or some other form of discrimination. African American student also tell me that even some of their black friends make racist comments about Mexicans or some other racial group and that they felt sorry for them and their ignorant views. I have been doing this survey for seven years now, and the pattern remains the same. "Post Racial Society?" I wish it were true!

The politics of colonialism perpetuated by the white settlers in this country created a system that bends but does not break. It morphs, but it does not disappear. This has led many to suggest that racism may be a permanent structure that will not completely fade away because it was built to last. Today, when blacks and other non-white groups complain of police abuse or racial profiling that are said to "be playing the race card.' When the victims complain they are told we "live in a colorblind society now." Nothing could be further from the truth as the fiasco created from the Rev. Wright controversy illustrates so clearly. White preachers are given a pass in this society. Billy Graham once made some anti-Semitic comments. Recently John Hagee, who endorsed McCain called the Catholic religion a "whore" of some sort. But when Rev. Wright began a discussion about race he was beat to a pulp in the media in an effort to shoot political skates under Obama. This is racism in the raw, but it is masked with charges of being "Unpatriotic" or "Anti-American."

Having said all of that, how could an African American run as a civil rights activist and have any reasonable chance to win unless he or she "toned it down." I think Obama has done a good job of "toning it down" in order to prevent the diehard racists from being able to get him outright. Remember, it was the trumped up charges of the rape of some white woman that allowed for the racist mob to lynch a black. They don't use the real ropes much anymore, but use political ropes that have racial threads. Hillary Clinton acted like a real southern racist white woman when she said that she can carry the white vote in the states she recently won. That mere statement galvanized racist votes to her campaign - it's that real. Racism is still a central motivating factor in elections and other social functions, and Hillary knew how to awaken the not so sleepy monster.

Obama represents the idea that a black man can rule a country and be fair. This may be all he has to offer after they get through with him. Time will tell, but the racial structures in existence in Washington will not go away if he wins. There is even talk about him being killed if he wins. Remember just because your black doesn't mean you are "black." Clarence Thomas is black by definition, but hardly black politically. I am voting for Obama, but I am under no illusions about the power of racism to co-opt, corrupt, and oppress. It is important that he be elected, but it is equally important that we understand the political dynamics of a country founded upon racism. We are not in a "post racial society,' that's pure foolishness. Racial profiling, police abuse, and Katrina tells me different, as does the battering of Rev. Wright (despite his foolishness of letting racism use him as a tool) and the hate mongering going on at talk radio.

Poor Americans Are Country's Most Charitable Demographic

Recent surveys have found that not only do the poor donate more per capita than individuals in higher income brackets, but that their generosity tends to remain higher during economic downturns, McClatchy Newspapers reports.

According to Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, people in the bottom 20 percent of the population in terms of wealth tend to give more than their capacity to give, while those in the next two-fifths give at capacity. Americans in the top 40 percent are capable of donating two or three times more than they actually give, Hodgkinson said.

The latest survey of consumer expenditures by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the poorest one-fifth of American households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their income to charitable organizations in 2007, while the richest fifth donated 2.1 percent of their income. The pretax household income of the poorest fifth averaged $10,531 in 2007, while the top fifth averaged $158,388. The discrepancy is even more notworthy because charitable gifts from the poor are effectively not tax-deductible because the poor don't earn enough to justify itemizing their deductions.

While the poorest Americans tend to be the least educated and most likely to be on welfare, the ranks of the poor also include a large number of women, who tend to be more generous than men. Moreover, the working poor — a disproportionate number of whom are recent immigrants — are America's most generous group, according to Arthur Brooks, author of Who Really Cares and president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank.

Others believe that the poor give more because they require less to be happy. "When you have just a little, you're thankful for what you have," said Pastor Coletta Jones, minister of the Rock Christian Church, a tithing, largely low-income congregation in Washington, D.C. "But with every step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and gets you into a state of never being satisfied."

Jay Leno Takes Final Bow on ‘Tonight Show’

New York TimesMay 30, 2009By BILL CARTER

LOS ANGELES — Jay Leno ended his final “Tonight Show” on Friday not with a surprise guest or a selection of his vintage comedy bits, but with what he called “the greatest thing we’ve ever done.” What followed was an onstage parade of the children — 68 in all — who had been born to people who had met because they worked on the program.

He saluted Warren Littlefield, the former NBC entertainment president who stood by him in the rocky early days of his show, and his wife of more than 30 years, Mavis, who took a bow in the audience.

And he thanked Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Monica Lewinsky and Michael Jackson for giving him so much material. He also introduced his successor, Conan O’Brien, his final couch guest, saying, “I couldn’t be prouder of him,” and calling him “a terrific guy and a good friend.”

After 17 years as the host of “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Leno’s final show on Friday night, his 3,775th, was much like many of the others, filled with monologue jokes and some of his signature comedy pieces. He presented highlights of many of those pieces during his last week, but saved perhaps the most popular, “Jaywalking,” for the finale. The segment consists of Mr. Leno asking basic questions of people in the street, who come up with mind-boggling answers. href="Click to read full article.

In addition to relieving McKnight as the ESG 2 commander, Howard assumes command of several U.S. 5th Fleet task forces, including Combined Task Force (CTF) 51 and 59, as well as CTF 151, an international maritime coalition created to disrupt, deter and thwart piracy.

“I’m very fortunate to follow behind Admiral McKnight,” said Howard. “He and the staff have done a terrific job in standing up CTF 151. His leadership will be missed on the waterfront.”

"I think I'm getting a crush on Michelle Obama"

First Lady Michelle Obama and Jack Cafferty

Commentary: My crush on Michelle Obama

By Jack CaffertySpecial to CNN

Editor's note: Jack Cafferty is the author of a new book, "Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream," to be published in March. He provides commentary on CNN's "The Situation Room" daily from 4 to 7 p.m. ET. You can also visit Jack's Cafferty File blog.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- I think I am developing a crush on America's first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He's good, but she's utterly fascinating.

Mrs. Obama has blown away the stale air in a White House musty from eight years of the Bushes. It's like the sun came out and a fresh spring breeze began wafting through the open windows.

It's the people's house, and Michelle Obama totally gets it. So much so that she has taken to inviting people in from the streets to see her home. Nice touch -- one completely lacking in her recent predecessors.

Watch her when she visits a local school and you see the warmth and affection she instantly triggers in people. Kids are pretty much totally honest with very good BS-detectors. If they sense you're a phony, forget it. But around the first lady, they want to hug her and laugh with her and tell her stories.

You can see the same qualities these kids recognize in her daughters. She is the consummate mother as evidenced by the poised, polite smiling children she and her husband are raising. I have four daughters, and trust me -- they don't turn out like the Obama children without devoted parents.

New to the Washington neighborhood, Michelle Obama has taken it upon herself to go around and introduce herself to the people in the various agencies of government. When's the last time a first lady did that? I don't ever remember it before. And during her visits she listens rather than lectures. And people respond to her.The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jack Cafferty.

Why I Support the Stimulus

Washington Post By Arlen SpecterMonday, February 9, 2009

I am supporting the economic stimulus package for one simple reason: The country cannot afford not to take action.

The unemployment figures announced Friday, the latest earnings reports and the continuing crisis in banking make it clear that failure to act will leave the United States facing a far deeper crisis in three or six months. By then the cost of action will be much greater -- or it may be too late.

Wave after wave of bad economic news has created its own psychology of fear and lowered expectations. As in the old Movietone News, the eyes and ears of the world are upon the United States. Failure to act would be devastating not just for Wall Street and Main Street but for much of the rest of the world, which is looking to our country for leadership in this crisis.

The legislation known as the "moderates" bill, hammered out over two days by Sens. Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and myself, preserves the job-creating and tax relief goals of President Obama's stimulus plan while cutting less-essential provisions -- many of them worthy in themselves -- that are better left to the regular appropriations process.

Our $780 billion bill would save or create up to 4 million jobs, helping to offset the loss of 3.6 million jobs since December 2007. The bill cuts some $110 billion from the $890 billion Senate version, which would actually be $940 billion if floor amendments for tax credits on home and car purchases and money for the National Institutes of Health are retained.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the proposed cuts "do violence to what we are trying to do for the future," especially on education. Her objections are a warning to conservatives that more cuts would be unlikely to win House approval. They are also an admission of the high price that moderates have been able to extract for their support of stimulus legislation.

If a stimulus bill doesn't pass, there won't be any money for Title I education programs. The moderates' bill provides marginally less money for Title I than the House and Senate bills. But while it's less than supporters want, this proverbial half a loaf beats no loaf by a mile.

In health funding, both the House and Senate bills contain billions of dollars for wellness and prevention programs, including for smoking cessation, prenatal screening and counseling, education, and immunization. The moderates' bill, regrettably but necessarily, cancels this funding on the grounds that such programs are better left to the regular appropriations process.

"In politics," John Kennedy used to say, "nobody gets everything, nobody gets nothing and everybody gets something." My colleagues and I have tried to balance the concerns of both left and right with the need to act quickly for the sake of our country. The moderates' compromise, which faces a cloture vote today, is the only bill with a reasonable chance of passage in the Senate.

The writer is a Republican senator from Pennsylvania.

E. J. Dionne

Time to Play Hardball

Washington PostColumnistBy E. J. Dionne Jr.February 5, 2009

The irony of President Obama's Blue Tuesday is that the wall-to-wall television interviews he granted were designed not to apologize for Tom Daschle's fall from grace but to fight back against the Republicans' success in tarnishing his stimulus package.

Obama's network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans -- short on new ideas, low on votes and deeply unpopular in the polls -- have been winning the media war over the president's central initiative.

They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to "less than 1 percent of the overall package." But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.

Daschle's withdrawal as the nominee for secretary of health and human services poses a long-term challenge to the administration's ambitious health-care plans because the former Senate majority leader was so crucial to the White House's strategy. But the battering that the stimulus has taken is an immediate problem.

Although Obama aides dismiss the media coverage as "cable chatter" important only inside the "Washington echo chamber," they acknowledge that Congress does its work inside that noisy hall and that the journalistic back-and-forth has tainted its key legislative objective. "We didn't give it as much air cover last week as we should" have, said one top adviser. "We lost a week."

This thinking was reflected during Obama's interviews, once he got through his apologies for having "screwed up" the Daschle matter.

Obama kept bringing the stimulus discussion back to the bill's purpose of restoring life to a cratered economy. He also highlighted the bill's substantive elements -- in health care, education, energy and relief to fiscally ailing states -- that have received scant attention in news accounts dominated by political questions regarding how much Obama should concede to the Republican minority.

For most of the debate, Obama has cast himself as a benevolent referee overseeing a sprawling and untidy legislative process to which he would eventually bring order. He urged Democrats to knock out small spending measures that had caused public relations problems while doing little to defend the overall package or to reply to its Republican critics.

In the meantime, those critics have been relentless, often casting logic aside to reframe the debate from a practical concern over how to rescue the economy to an ideological dispute about government spending.

"This plan is a spending plan; it's not a stimulus plan," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), ignoring the truth that stimulus plans -- including Republican proposals to put more money into resolving the housing crisis -- by definition include significant new spending.

And Republicans who in one breath say they want more tax cuts declare in the next that they are against the tax cuts Obama has proposed.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona said of Obama's $500 refundable tax credit: "Calling a rebate to people who don't pay income taxes a tax cut doesn't make it a tax cut." Presumably Kyl doesn't consider as taxes the payroll taxes (or, for that matter, sales taxes) paid disproportionately by low- and middle-income Americans.

But such volleys have gone largely unreturned, and the biggest danger for Obama will come if Republican attacks erode support for the stimulus among Democrats. That's why the president will be spending more time with congressional Democrats in the coming days. The administration's visionary emphasis on winning expansive Republican support has been replaced by a down-to-earth struggle to get a bill through the Senate.

Its hopes rest in part on a different form of bipartisanship. If Washington Republicans have decided to build a wall of opposition to the stimulus, Republican governors and mayors are eager for the money Obama wants to give them.

Thus will Obama and his allies be touting strong support for the stimulus from the Republican governors of California, Connecticut, Florida and Vermont. Mayors will be called upon to move House Republicans still open to persuasion.

In just two weeks, the elation of Inauguration Day has given way to a classic form of partisan hardball. Obama and his advisers have been forced to learn basic lessons on the run. For starters, the media cannot be counted on to be either liberal or permanently enchanted with any politician. Arguments left unanswered can take hold, whether they make sense or not. And one more lesson: No occupant of the White House has ever been able to walk on water.

postchat@aol.com

Why Is the Government Hell-Bent on Rewarding Greed, Incompetence and Narcissism?

By Jim HightowerCreators SyndicateFebruary 5, 2009

Bankers have never been much loved, but gollies, this Wall Street bunch seems hell-bent on being loathed.

As a consequence of their avaricious grab for outrageous personal enrichment during the past decade, these arrogant titans of financial gimmickry have caused a vast economic collapse that is presently costing million of Americans their homes, jobs, pensions and dreams -- while also bringing down the banks themselves.

As you would expect, the Wall Streeters who did this to us are now humbled and filled with deep remorse. HA! Just kidding.

Instead, the perpetrators keep grasping for all they can get, taking no responsibility for the damage they've done. Obtuse? Self-indulgent? Narcissistic? What's with these people? A few examples of their bloated sense of entitlement:

• While Merrill Lynch was imploding last year, requiring a $25 billion salvage job from us taxpayers, CEO John Thain was merrily spending $1.2 million to redecorate his office, including buying a $13,000 "custom" coffee table, a $1,400 wastebasket and a $35,000 antique commode (add your own toilet joke here).

In such tough times, why didn't he just make do with the perfectly luxurious office of his predecessor?

"Well ... his office was very different than the ... the general decor of Merrill's offices," Thain told a CNBC interviewer. "It really would have been ... very difficult ... for ... me to use it in the form it was in."

• Citigroup, which lost $28 billion in the past 15 months, has now received a $345 billion bailout from Washington. Time to cut nonessential spending, right? Yes -- as long as "essential" includes a new $50 million Dassault Falcon 7X jet for top executives.

Never mind that the bank already has five executive jets in its fleet. It took a public expression of outrage from President Barack Obama to get Citigroup's honchos to back off this extravagance, and it's said that they're still sulking about it.

• Despite their historically disastrous year in 2008, Wall Street investment bankers awarded themselves a total of $18.4 billion in bonuses -- the sixth-largest payout on record! Shouldn't they be embarrassed, you ask? Of course, but a January poll of the bankers found that 46 percent of them felt they deserved a bigger bonus.

By the way, the Street's rationalization for such giveaways is that top bankers must be showered with treasure in order to keep them hitched to the corporate plow. "Retention bonuses," they're called. Merrill Lynch's Thain, for example, doled out $4 billion in bonuses last fall while the firm was awaiting its bailout check, explaining that it's essential to "pay your best people," or they'll leave.

Shouldn't he have to wear a clown costume when saying silly stuff like that? Leave to where? The whole Street is on fire. Besides, these are the geniuses who lit the match -- who would want them?

Which brings us to the "Obama stage" of the banker bailout. At its core, his plan looks like more of the same. The government (you and I) will buy the bad loans now held by the banks, paying an inflated value for them. This gift will make us by far the biggest investor in Wall Street -- yet, even though we're putting up the capital, Obama's team does not require a commensurate decision-making role for the public.

One decision in particular needs our say-so: Who's going to manage the money? Under Obama's plan, the same old obtuse, self-indulgent, narcissistic -- and failed -- bankers would keep their jobs and control the bailout. It seems the president's top economic advisors, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, don't have the stomach for the real housecleaning needed to set Wall Street right. Instead, they cower behind knee-jerk ideological platitudes, scoffing that "governments make poor bank managers."

Hello? It's hard to be a poorer manager of America's financial system than the current group of greed-headed "free marketers." They lost hundreds of billions of dollars in bank assets during the past year or so, wrecking our economy in the process, and now they want to be rescued.

Rescue the system, yes. But not those who wrecked it. Wall Street's culture of excess should not be rewarded, and any bailout should begin by insisting that all of those who did this to America be fired.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.

Well, That Certainly Didn’t Take Long

On 9/11, President Bush learned of disaster while reading “The Pet Goat” to grade-school kids. On Tuesday, President Obama escaped from disaster by reading “The Moon Over Star” to grade-school kids.

“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the two-week-old president, with Michelle at his side, explained to students at a public charter school near the White House.

Even as he told the children his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spider-Man, his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT!

It just ain’t that easy.

Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over.

“I think I messed up. I screwed up,” he confessed to Couric.

He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made “a serious mistake” by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.)

Mr. Obama admitted that “ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Before he recanted, his hand forced by a cascade of appointees who “forgot” to pay taxes, his reasoning was creeping perilously close to that of the outgoing leaders he denounced in his Inaugural Address: that elitist mentality of “we know best,” we know we’re doing the “right” thing for the country, so we can twist the rules.

Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order “Dave” from Netflix.

When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.

“Who does these books?” Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. “If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.”

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.

As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.” He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that “we can’t send a protectionist message.”

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks.

Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money.

Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers.

Until it came to light Tuesday, Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month.

As ABC reported, Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach. (Morgan Stanley had also still planned to send top employees to Monte Carlo and the Bahamas, events just canceled.)

The New York Post revealed that Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.

The interior of the 18-seat jet, as described by The Post, is posh, with a full bar, fine-wine selection, $13,000 carpets, Baccarat crystal glasses, Cristofle sterling silver flatware and — my personal favorite — pillows made from Hermès scarves.

Aux barricades!

David Brooks Writes About My Old Washington, DC Neighborhood

Ward Three Morality

New York TimesFebruary 3, 2009Op-Ed ColumnistBy DAVID BROOKS

I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code. First, there were those auto executives who didn’t realize that it is no longer socially acceptable to use private jets for lobbying trips to Washington. Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

Then there are the Wall Street executives who were suddenly attacked from the White House for giving out the same sort of bonuses they’ve been giving out for years. Now there is Tom Daschle, who is being criticized for making $5 million off his Senate prestige.

I’m afraid there are rich people all around the country who are about to suffer similar social self-immolation because they don’t understand that the rules of privileged society have undergone a radical transformation.

The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.

But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.

First, try to submit to the new sumptuary codes. People in Ward Three have nationalized extravagance and privatized Puritanism. Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose. Dazzling personal consumption is out. Middle-class drabness is in. It’s sad, but there’s nothing to be done.

Second, in conversation, try not to say that times are so hard that you are down to your last $400 million. This will not arouse as much sympathy as you might think.

Third, there are times when Masters of the Universe must be Masters of the Grovel. If you are a hedge fund manager and you find yourself in conversation with a person from Ward Three, apologize for ruining the Hamptons, and subsequently, the entire global economy.

What you must realize, above all, is the rich no longer control the economy and its mores. Ward Three people do, and their rule has just begun.

With his stimulus, Obama is demonstrating a knack for maneuvering around roadblocks

Obama's Big-Tent Stimulus

Washington Post ColumnistBy E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, January 9, 2009

It has been so long since Congress needed to pass a huge and urgent package of spending increases and tax cuts that few people understand how the politics of such a thing might work.For at least two decades, Washington has focused (if sometimes only rhetorically) on the politics of deficit reduction.

Nobody has a playbook for consciously and intentionally embarking on large-scale deficit spending. President-elect Barack Obama's economic speech yesterday was an attempt to write a first draft.

The substantive issues surrounding an economic stimulus -- will the package be big enough and what mix of spending and tax cuts would do the job best? -- are clearer than the politics of getting it passed fast. Here's how Obama is trying to weave the politics and the substance together.

To begin with, there is deep resistance to deficits from the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, for whom deficit reduction has been akin to a religious commitment. That's one reason Obama has been talking about controlling future entitlement spending and why he is touting plans to root out inefficiencies in government -- witness the attention he gave to naming Nancy Killefer, a management consultant, as his "chief performance officer."

For Obama, a highly public war against waste and fraud will ease passage of the stimulus while also showing that Democrats, who propose using government as the instrument for solving a lot of problems, intend to make reform a high priority.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to do her part as early as next week by bringing up a bill sponsored by Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) that would require agency-by-agency audits to eliminate waste.

The effort to win over the more conservative Democrats is working. On Wednesday, for example, Rep. Jim Cooper, also of Tennessee and a leading advocate of entitlement reform, praised Obama for insisting that "we can stimulate the economy and address our long-term problems at the same time."

Obama may also face a conflict between getting his package passed fast and having it contain the most effective proposals. Many economists, particularly but not exclusively liberals, argue that government spending programs stimulate the economy more quickly than tax cuts. Recipients of tax cuts might choose to save rather than spend the money they get back or use it to pay down debt.Obama solves this problem in part by focusing much of his tax relief on middle- and low-income Americans, who are more likely to use the money for consumption. And the bulk of the package involves new spending, particularly on infrastructure and new environmental and technological investments. He is also pushing programs especially important to liberals: increases in unemployment benefits and food stamps, and fiscal relief to states for Medicaid and education expenditures.

Help to the state governments is crucial because they face a shortfall of more than $350 billion between now and 2011, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In squeezing their own budgets, states could counteract the impact of a federal stimulus. That's why Obama went out of his way to pledge to "help struggling states avoid harmful budget cuts."

But about $100 billion of the package is expected to go to a variety of business tax cuts, some likely to be at best marginally stimulative. Why is Obama doing this? One Capitol Hill Democrat familiar with the president-elect's recent meeting with congressional leaders said that Obama told Republicans that while he could probably get his program through with mostly Democratic votes, he preferred to win GOP support so that his program could pass quickly and be sustainable over time.

The price may be worth paying, but only if the business tax cuts would actually promote a quick recovery. Wasting part of the economic package on ancient business wish lists would violate Obama's own call for political leaders to "put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests."

Nonetheless, the most striking aspect of Obama's approach is how attuned he has been to his task as politician in chief. He has, so far, managed to maneuver around potential roadblocks rather than blast through them, even as he proposes a reorientation of our politics.

"Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy," Obama declared yesterday. Considering how profoundly this view contrasts with the old conventional wisdom -- "the era of big government is over," "government is the problem" -- it may be worth making a few concessions to put the country on a very different path.

While the nation's capital obsesses over Barack Obama's next Cabinet pick, the president-elect's lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama's vast grass-roots network?

Electoral campaigns, like circus tents, quickly disappear after the show is over. But Obama is our first community-organizer president, and he sees the way he got elected as being almost as crucial as the fact that he won. Because of the emphasis he put on organizing, barackobama.com might fairly be seen as the most successful high-tech startup of the past two years.

Over and over, Obama has spoken of change coming from "the bottom up," and the organization he built down to the precinct and neighborhood level could be an agent of that change. But how?

The discussion among Obama's lieutenants focuses on several alternatives. In one view, the Obama apparatus could be integrated into the Democratic Party and be run through the Democratic National Committee. Many of Obama's top aides, including campaign manager David Plouffe, are veterans of traditional Democratic politics.

Turning the Obama network into a vast national party organization could give Democrats durable advantages that the party has not enjoyed since the New Deal era, when Franklin Roosevelt built an alliance between local political machines and a growing labor movement.

But Plouffe himself has been much affected by the new way of campaigning he oversaw. His regular video reports to the troops turned him into something of a hero to the Obama faithful.

Moreover, Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, has argued that members of the network include many who are averse to traditional party politics: young people with weak party loyalties, independents and even some Republicans. He has been suggesting at Democratic gatherings that the Obama apparatus might instead constitute itself as an independent political organization -- friendly and parallel to the Democratic Party but a separate entity nonetheless. Obama supporters are also discussing how local networks could integrate into their communities through various forms of service work and activism. Obama's Web site is raising money for the victims of the Southern California fires.

The importance of cultivating the network and keeping it intact was underscored by an online survey that Plouffe sent to supporters on Tuesday. The survey explicitly asked: "How would you like to see this organization move forward in the months and years ahead?"

Offering a clue as to what Obama insiders are thinking, the survey asked supporters to rank four objectives: helping the new administration "pass legislation through grass-roots efforts"; helping elect state and local candidates "who share the same vision for our country"; training others in the organizing techniques perfected by the campaign; and "working on local issues that impact our communities."

Notably absent from that list was the word "Democrat."

Yet there is only so much distance that Obama either can or wants to keep from his party. He is, in important ways, a loyal Chicago organization Democrat. Plouffe is currently using the Obama fundraising network to help the Democratic National Committee erase its deficit.

Obama supporters have been moving into Georgia to help Democrat Jim Martin in his Dec. 2 runoff election against incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss. Yet Obama himself has yet to make clear how forcefully he'll intervene in a state that he lost. A Martin victory would signal the depth of the nation's desire for change, but a new president-elect with soaring popularity may not want to subject himself to such an early test on not-entirely-hospitable terrain.

One Democratic strategist said that parts of the Obama organization are still mistrustful of the national committee, seeing it as a redoubt for Hillary and Bill Clinton loyalists. But this view is waning, since Obama, as the party's undisputed leader, will inevitably take over the party apparatus, and he is making peace with the Clintons, notably by suggesting he may want Sen. Clinton as his secretary of state.

The urgency of the organizational discussion signals that Obama's lieutenants see the 2008 campaign as having fundamentally altered the contours of American politics.

Democrats believe (and many Republicans fear) that Obama allowed his party and its allies to take an enormous leap forward in both technological sophistication and grass-roots activism. Preserving those gains and building on them is a priority for a man who sees organizing not only as instrumental but also as a way of transforming democracy itself.

postchat@aol.com

First Lady Could Be Boon For Black Girls

Sun, Nov. 09, 2008 By Merlene DavisHerald-Leader columnist

President-elect Barack Obama, in no small measure, carries the high expectations of African-Americans on his narrow but steady shoulders.

But what of the woman standing next to Obama, the one he called his "rock" and the "love of his life?" What do people expect of Michelle Obama, who will soon be the first black first lady of this land?

I asked three black professional women what effect she will have on our daughters, our race and this country.

"The same effect as Barack Obama," said Roszalyn Akins, a former Fayette County public schools educator and first lady of First Baptist Church, Bracktown. "Speaking as an educator, I see little girls saying, "Wow, look at her. Look at what I can be."

What they will see, as the months and years pass, will be a strong black woman who is not only intelligent and educated but also personable and beautiful. They will see a manner of dress and style they can model.

In other words, Michelle Obama won't have to dance half-naked in music videos to be a hero for young girls. Her style will change an image that has been around far too long.

As the wife of a minister, Akins has seen how her dress and carriage are modeled by other women in the church.

"You set the tone," she said. "Michelle will be setting the tone for how other African-Americans get excited about themselves."

Having a black first family in Washington will only help efforts at Bracktown, where the church has set up a boys' and a girls' academy that stresses not only education but also etiquette and self-esteem.

"Young girls will see a powerful couple who are on the same plane and they can aspire to have the same kind of life," Akins said. "They will see they don't have to settle. They can look at life differently in the selection of a mate."

The Obamas are an example of black families who aren't publicized as much as those headed by single women or who struggle in low-paying jobs to keep poverty at bay. The Obamas overcame those obstacles to live the American Dream.

Michelle Obama grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family that expected success and in which the children refused to disappoint their father, who worked daily despite having multiple sclerosis.

She graduated with honors from Princeton University and from Harvard Law School in 1988. She met her husband while working at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where he was an intern. That résumé alone would be impressive, but there is something more there.

"She exudes self-confidence and self-esteem, and her self-image is very high," said Wilma Peeples of Thomas-Peeples and Associates Inc., a counseling and therapy practice. "That persona will show other women, regardless of ethnicity, and girls in particular that they can do the same."

That visual is worth more than words. People will see Michelle Obama's work ethic, her determination and resilience, and her vision and mission, "which is far beyond a job or career," Peeples said. "She's always known she has a mission, and she didn't allow anything to get in the way.

"She also joined with someone else who had a mission," she said. "They have something they are supposed to carry out."

Peeples said a mission is more than a passion. We can be passionate about singing and not be able to carry a note.

"A mission is something I've been placed here to do," she said. "You have to figure that out. She will encourage others to think about their own purpose and mission."

Along with that image will be another that is not often addressed, said Deborah Keys, a certified family life educator. It is that of a successful black man in love with a black woman."As a black mother with black daughters," she said, "it was very heartening to see an intelligent successful black man choose a black woman for his wife. According to the stereotype, the mark of your success as a black man is having a white wife. It is a boon for marriage."

She said the Obamas will walk into the White House as an intact family, which flies in the face of yet another stereotype. "It gives our boys and girls something to aspire to," she said. "They may not all have his position, but they can all have his lifestyle."

Plus, she said, after telling young black girls for years that they descend from black queens, Michelle Obama can serve as an example of the closest thing we have to such royalty in the U.S.

"We talk about being queens, but she will actually be a queen," Keys said.

So along with selecting cabinet and staff members who will help steer this country in a new direction, Barack and Michelle Obama will have the unenviable task of reshaping how all of us have viewed the African-American culture in this country.

That's a pretty big job, one no one should be saddled with. But it is the job and responsibility that has always befallen a "first."

Will it be too much for the Obamas to uphold?

Peeples doesn't think so.

"When you come to that understanding, that you have a mission, to other people it may seem like a lot," she said. "But once you know what it is you are supposed to be doing, it is not a burden."

That is a good thing for the Obamas, and for all of us who are latching onto their star.

Followers

It Still Felt Good the Morning After

There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

November 9, 2008Op-Ed ColumnistNew York TimesBy FRANK RICH

ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.

And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”

The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.

The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.

But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.

This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.

That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.

If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.

Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

Morning in America

Washington PostBy Eugene RobinsonThursday, November 6, 2008

I almost lost it Tuesday night when television cameras found the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Chicago's Grant Park and I saw the tears streaming down his face. His brio and bluster were gone, replaced by what looked like awestruck humility and unrestrained joy. I remembered how young he was in 1968 when he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., moments before King was assassinated and hours before America's cities were set on fire.

I almost lost it again when I spoke with Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bravest leaders of the civil rights crusade, and asked whether he had ever dreamed he would live to see this day. As Lewis looked for words beyond "unimaginable," I thought of the beating he received on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the scars his body still bears.

I did lose it, minutes before the television networks projected that Barack Obama would be the 44th president of the United States, when I called my parents in Orangeburg, S.C. I thought of the sacrifices they made and the struggles they endured so that my generation could climb higher. I felt so happy that they were here to savor this incredible moment.

I scraped myself back together, but then almost lost it again when I saw Obama standing there on the stage with his family -- wife Michelle, daughters Malia and Sasha, their outfits all color-coordinated in red and black. I thought of the mind-blowing imagery we will see when this young, beautiful black family becomes the nation's First Family.

Then, when Michelle's mother, brother and extended family came out, I thought about "the black family" as an institution -- how troubled it is, but also how resilient and how vital. And I found myself getting misty-eyed again when Barack and Michelle walked off the stage together, clinging to one another, partners about to embark on an adventure, full of possibility and peril, that will change this nation forever.

It's safe to say that I've never had such a deeply emotional reaction to a presidential election. I've found it hard to describe, though, just what it is that I'm feeling so strongly.

It's obvious that the power of this moment isn't something that only African Americans feel. When President Bush spoke about the election yesterday, he mentioned the important message that Americans will send to the world, and to themselves, when the Obama family moves into the White House.

For African Americans, though, this is personal.

I can't help but experience Obama's election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance -- which is patently absurd, if you think about it. The labor of black people made this great nation possible. Black people planted and tended the tobacco, indigo and cotton on which America's first great fortunes were built. Black people fought and died in every one of the nation's wars. Black people fought and died to secure our fundamental rights under the Constitution. We don't have to ask for anything from anybody.

Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans -- white, black, Latino, Asian -- entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency. I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there's more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there's more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.

It's not that I would have felt less love of country if voters had chosen John McCain. And this reaction I'm trying to describe isn't really about Obama's policies. I'll disagree with some of his decisions, I'll consider some of his public statements mere double talk and I'll criticize his questionable appointments. My job will be to hold him accountable, just like any president, and I intend to do my job.

For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say "it's morning again in America." The new sunshine feels warm on my face.

eugenerobinson@ washpost.com

10 Reasons Obama Won

By Ivo IvanovKansas City Star Midwest Voices panelist

If there was an open-ended book that told the journey of this nation, I wonder how big, important and historic the chapter on this 2008 election would be.

There were so many “first-time-ever” moments, so many groundbreaking choices and so many unexpected developments that I believe we’ve just experienced a major plot line twist in the turbulent narrative of our history.

Now that the longest and most expensive election season is mercifully over, it is time to make a step back and take a more relaxed, unbiased, and analytical look at all the factors that shaped and ultimately predetermined the final outcome.

Most historians will probably agree that it wasn’t just one or two things that decided the election, but rather a complex amalgamation of events, decisions, strategies and characters.

Just revisiting the whirlwind of madness and campaign surprises in the last two months is a daunting task. We won’t have to wait long before dissertations, books, and personal accounts are written, taking us to the kitchen and giving us a better glimpse at every choice and every error that propelled one campaign and damaged the other.

Counting down from least to most important, here are just ten of the factors I believe were largely responsible for what happened today at the voting booth:

Reason # 10: OUR TIMES

YouTube didn’t even exist in 2004 and podcasting was yet to become a word. Video compression was still struggling to make files smaller and easily available.

Internet was a player in the Kerry-Bush election but not on the monumental scale that it is today. Social networks became a massive vehicle for political message delivery and consumer generated content, often outperformed traditional media.

The younger, savvier, and more webgenic (I should trademark that one) Obama acclimated faster and more intuitively to the new digital environment. He quickly gathered nearly 1million “friends” on MySpace and went viral on Internet video with his message and persona. He had an immediate presence on YouTube with his own channel not to mention the young fanatics generating their own content.

It’s not that McCain’s people didn’t try – they did but his political avatar seemed artificial and forced. Obama was so far ahead of the curve that he came up with another first and programmed his advertisements inside video games, reaching simultaneously young voters and my good 44 year old buddy and game addict Mark from Lenexa.

Reason # 9: MONEY

Barack Obama’s charisma combined with a competent team proved to be a fund raising machine, breaking every imaginable record and unwillingly raising the question whether the whole mechanism shouldn’t be overhauled and regulated with spending caps. His campaign had accumulated the kind of funds that should make all of us uncomfortable.

Barack’s integrity as a president will, no doubt, come under fire every time his executive decisions coincide with special interest donations. As voters, we should hope and insist that the system is changed before the next election.

At the end, Obama had so much money that he came up with another cutting edge maneuver: flooding prime time blocks of TV airtime with hyper-effective, superbly produced infomercials. These were so good, that one day I expect to see them in political science textbooks.

Reason # 8: JOE THE PLUMBER

Demographic segmentation was a successful device in the last few elections. “The Angry White Male” went republican in 1994, Dole tried to romance “The Soccer Mom” in 1996, and Bush Jr. captured the perpetual left turn imagination of “The Nascar Dad” in 2004.

So naturally, McCain tried rather desperately to carve a voting bloc borrowing the same divisive strategy for his campaign. I firmly believe that this backfired. The general public simply got tired and felt patronized by this ridiculous social segmentation. Who in the world is “Joe six pack” and why should he be different from “Steve gin and tonic” and “Sally mocaccino”?

And before designating someone “Joe the Plumber”, mentioning his imaginary demographic 20 times in your debate, and using him as a campaign capital, please make sure that he actually is a plumber or that at least his name is Joe.

Now, that Sam (his real name) has hired an agent to get him a country music contract, the entire Joe the Plumber debacle is a complete joke the plumber.

At the end none of that silliness mattered as it became obvious that all the hockey moms, Joe six packs, and even Hanging Chads in the world can’t compensate for lack of substance and compelling agenda.

Reason # 7: RUNNING MATES

Initially, I wasn’t convinced that Barack Obama made the right choice by picking Joe Biden as his running mate.

Then came the one and only vice presidential debate and Joe “six pack” (he’s been doing crunches) Biden smacked a 500 foot homerun. He came across as extremely knowledgeable, intelligent, caring, funny, gracious, calm, tough, human and…overqualified. Yes, Biden was so overwhelmingly good at the debate that I couldn’t help but think that he is more ready to be president than Obama. His opponent didn’t perform badly. Take away a few ill-advised mannerisms and she exceeded every expectation – it’s just that he took it out of the ball park in every aspect.

I’ll go against the grain here and say that John McCain’s pick was a brilliant if selfish move. It was a cosmetic procedure that he knew was urgently needed. Don’t forget that his campaign was basically left for dead in the political morgue just before the convention. Sarah Palin’s charisma and speech reading bravado at least got it back on its feet and moving. Sure, it was a slow walking zombie strut but at least now it was on the streets looking for a bite of flesh to eat.

Unfortunately for McCain, Palin’s inexperience and massive deficiencies were discovered almost immediately. As mentioned, this is the information age and every little mistake is instantly identified, magnified and distributed virally around the world. Her interviews were unprecedented, scandalous disasters.As a concept, Sarah might have worked in Dan Quayle times but the 21st century is a different story and I’m sure McCain wished many times that not a sound would come out every time she opened her mouth in front of the press...like a real barracuda.

Reason # 6: BRANDING AND MARKETING

It’s all about formulating your identity, branding an uncomplicated message and marketing it to everybody over the age of 18, isn’t it?

Obama, managed by a team of brilliant Washington outsiders, was able to package, market and distribute his charismatic self and easily digestible message of “change”.

McCain on the other hand struggled to find an electable identity and clear voice, losing himself inside the ambiguous labyrinths of his “maverick” persona.

Reason # 5: JOHN MCCAIN

Just a few months ago it was hard not to respect and value Senator John McCain. An independent thinking war hero that habitually ignored party lines to make the right decision, he was perceived as man of integrity and honor. But with his back pushed to the wall by a powerful Obama campaign, McCain changed dramatically.

It was a stunning, negative transformation that can only be explained with his campaign management team – I have a hard time believing that almost overnight the Senator from Arizona compromised almost everything he stood for. He hired the same shady, mud slinging characters that he criticized for swift boating fellow war hero Kerry in 2004. Karl Rove, the man he loathed, became a consultant for his own campaign.

Unable to come up with superior plan on the issues, he focused on his opponent. In the last month, his entire strategy was centered on digging through Obama’s history trash bin in search of irrelevant past relationships.

He treated his opponent with utter disrespect during the first two debates and used up his campaign funds almost exclusively for negative robo-calls and TV commercials. His temper and demeanor became points of concern for voters. At this point, I am convinced that the McCain of old wouldn’t have voted for his new self on November 4th.

Reason # 4: BARACK OBAMA

Whether you want to use the cultural ethnonym “WASP” or not, it is hard to argue that for the last 232 years, The United States of America has had more or less the same president. Caucasian, prosperous members of the powerful political elite had pretty much usurped the executive branch.

They were Johns, and Georges, and Richards, and Jims. They often went by Jr. or the II or the III. Now we will have a man called Barrack Obama in the White House and America’s historic decision speaks volumes about the way this country has changed.

The United States of America has always searched for national identity in the melting pot designation and in the idea that anything is possible in the land of opportunity. Barack Obama is the epitome of this concept. He is bi-racial, multicultural, open minded and self-made – in many ways he is America.

Obama came to the political scene at the right moment and with the right tools. We needed a charismatic, resourceful leader with fresh ideas, intelligence and solid integrity. Obama is that man. He is a born politician, who can energize a crowd with his sheer presence and convey his message with ease and emotion. Here is something very indicative of Barack’s character: in his giant 30 minute infomercial he never once spoke against McCain’s character or Sarah Palin’s weaknesses. He respects his opponent and this presidential quality will be reflected in the way he administers his power.

Reason # 3: GEORGE W. BUSH

In the end, it was the catastrophic 8-year reign of the worst president in the United States of America that decided the election long before it even started.

Everything hurricane “George” touched turned to dust: the economy, international diplomacy, wars, crisis events, ecology, energy policy, education reform, etc., etc., etc. Almost every major decision taken by this administration had either disastrous or destructive consequences. There was an unparalleled level of incompetence and lack of accountability in the White House. The so-called Bush doctrine is a scam: it doesn’t exist because its policies are simply chaotic decisions and desperate adjustments driven not by strategy but by special interests and greed.

In observing the election I probably have the advantage of being an outsider: someone who has been raised in a foreign country without allegiance or prejudice to either party. To me, both major parties hold pretty much the same ideals and share the same master plan for America. I’ve always held the Republican party in very high regard relative to its history, vision and last but not least contributions to the demise of communism.

To me George W. Bush shamelessly betrayed the Republican Party and its legacy. Running 5 trillion dollar deficits, nurturing a monstrous bureaucracy, inventing reasons for a preemptive war on-the-go, torturing prisoners against international law, re-writing the constitution and spending lavishly non-existing political and financial currency goes against every Republican principle. This probably explains why a few hours ago so many of my Republican friends voted for Obama.

The country realized the gravity of its predicament and how crucial it is to never again vote simply for “the guy you’d rather have a beer with”.Poor John McCain tried so hard to disassociate himself from the tainted Bush legacy but such effort was always a doomed, Sisyphusian task. All Obama needed to do was simply mention the name “Bush” and McCain in the same sentence.

“Change” was the code word adopted by both campaigns but it came far more fluently to the Democratic candidate. It didn’t help that McCain decided to absorb some of the current administration’s residual military testosterone and declare a stubborn stance on the unpopular presence Iraq. Looking back, it was the inescapable, ominous shadow of the Bush factor that decided this historic election.

Reason #2: SAME AS REASON #3

Reason #1: SAME AS REASON #3 AND REASON #2

At the end, I believe November 4th, 2008 gave all of us a historic opportunity to participate in a one-of-a-kind election. We will look back at this day years from now as one of the defining moments of this country’s epic trajectory.

This was not a victory for Obama and the Democrats. This was a victory for all of us: Republicans, liberals, independents, blacks, whites…Americans. It was a victory for change and hope, because eight years deep into the 21st century, we are finally ready to actually enter the new Millennium the way we are supposed to: by embracing the beginning of an entirely new era.

CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA!

Invoke the Ancestors whose struggles brought us to this place

A friend sent this to me. Please share with others.

Last night, at a candlelight vigil and prayer service for the election, Dean Richardson, head of Rankin Chapel at Howard University in Washington, D. C., offered a powerful suggestion:

When you go to vote, as you watch the election returns, carry with you ancestors or family members or others who did not live to see this day.

Carry a photograph, or carry them in your heart.

Carry your great-grandparents, or a parent, or maybe someone like Fannie Lou Hamer.

Crowd that voting booth and that living room with those who dreamed the dream, as well as those who couldn't even imagine it.

Remember the Negro National Anthem by singing in your heart or aloud:And lift every voice...Till earth and heaven ring...

Blacks put their hearts behind Obama

Nov. 01, 2008 Miami HeraldColumnistBy BETH REINHARD

Along Sistrunk Boulevard in the heart of black Fort Lauderdale, churches and funeral homes are among the few establishments open for business. Sue & Lou's Soul Food is closed. So is Mary's Groceries. Many homes are boarded up.

But like an oasis in a largely impoverished desert, the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center beckons. Inside the grand white building, African Americans are voting for one of their own for president for the first time. The library has been one of the busiest early voting locations in South Florida.

Tough young men with baggy pants and gold chains. Gray-haired little old ladies using walkers and canes. Single moms in their work uniforms with toddlers in tow.

''I never would have thought I would live to see this day,'' said 70-year-old Idene Burley, who suffers from glaucoma and diabetes. 'Now this day has come, and I think, `What would my mother and father say about this?' If I could shout 'Glory Hallelujah!' that would feel good.''

On a recent day, more than 600 people had lined up by noon. The day before, more than 1,000 people voted. Some waited as long as five hours.

''It's kind of like a badge of honor to vote for Barack Obama,'' said Chris Smith, a former state representative and state Senate candidate who lives in the neighborhood.

Inside, there is only so much room for people to stand in line. So the library turned the auditorium into a waiting room and started showing movies. About 300 people, many clutching their sample ballots and newspaper endorsements, were watching Akeelah and the Bee, a delightful film about a black, 11-year-old girl who competes in the national spelling bee.

Walter Fulmore, an 18-year-old high school dropout wearing diamond studs, walked down the steps having completed his mission.

Would he be here if Obama was not on the ballot?

''To be completely honest, I do not think so,'' he said. ``He kind of opened my eyes.''

Mildred Gray, a 41-year-old nursing home aide with her hair tied up in a scarf, turned to her 2-year-old son and asked, ``Who are we voting for?''

The answer came from little J'mari: ``'Bama!''

Katrina Gamble, severely overweight and missing her right leg, was there for the second day in a row because questions about her address had to be cleared up.

But not everyone had such patience.

''We got to come back another day when I have more time,'' said 21-year-old Cortious Davis, also a nursing home worker. ``I have other things to do.''

Her remarks were a reminder that turnout among black voters typically lags behind whites. This is Obama's big gamble: If young people and African Americans turn out in force, he will win the presidency.

The only white people around the library that day were two staunch Obama supporters, Yale-trained lawyer A. Reynolds Gordon and his wife, Janet, who paid their own way to Florida from the wealthy Republican enclave of Easton, Conn.

He wore a light blue oxford, tie and khakis. She more a light blue sheath, a cardigan around her shoulders and a golf hat from their country club.

Other Obama volunteers directed any voters with problems to their lawn chairs in the middle of the parking lot.

''I wish I had been here eight years ago to help,'' Reynolds said, referring to the contested 2000 election. ``I thought I needed to be here this time.''

Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.

Behind The Attack Against ACORN

The right-wing attack against ACORN and its voter registration drive is based on clear falsehoods and is the latest chapter in a history of deliberate voter suppression orchestrated by the right, according to this video released by Brave New Films.

Over the last 18 months, ACORN has waged a voter registration campaign, which successfully helped enfranchise 1.3 million new voters. Conservative politicians and commentators, abetted by some media outlets, have countered that effort with a weeks-long campaign to discredit ACORN over bogus allegations of voter fraud.

Chicago Tribune endorsement: Barack Obama for President

However this election turns out, it will dramatically advance America's slow progress toward equality and inclusion. It took Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary courage in the Civil War to get us here. It took an epic battle to secure women the right to vote. It took the perseverance of the civil rights movement. Now we have an election in which we will choose the first African-American president . . . or the first female vice president.

In recent weeks it has been easy to lose sight of this history in the making. Americans are focused on the greatest threat to the world economic system in 80 years. They feel a personal vulnerability the likes of which they haven't experienced since Sept. 11, 2001. It's a different kind of vulnerability. Unlike Sept. 11, the economic threat hasn't forged a common bond in this nation. It has fed anger, fear and mistrust.

On Nov. 4 we're going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.

The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama. The Tribune is proud to endorse him today for president of the United States.

On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that.

Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

The Tribune in its earliest days took up the abolition of slavery and linked itself to a powerful force for that cause--the Republican Party. The Tribune's first great leader, Joseph Medill, was a founder of the GOP. The editorial page has been a proponent of conservative principles. It believes that government has to serve people honestly and efficiently.

With that in mind, in 1872 we endorsed Horace Greeley, who ran as an independent against the corrupt administration of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant. (Greeley was later endorsed by the Democrats.) In 1912 we endorsed Theodore Roosevelt, who ran as the Progressive Party candidate against Republican President William Howard Taft.

The Tribune's decisions then were driven by outrage at inept and corrupt business and political leaders.

We see parallels today.

The Republican Party, the party of limited government, has lost its way. The government ran a $237 billion surplus in 2000, the year before Bush took office -- and recorded a $455 billion deficit in 2008. The Republicans lost control of the U.S. House and Senate in 2006 because, as we said at the time, they gave the nation rampant spending and Capitol Hill corruption. They abandoned their principles. They paid the price.

We might have counted on John McCain to correct his party's course. We like McCain. We endorsed him in the Republican primary in Illinois. In part because of his persuasion and resolve, the U.S. stands to win an unconditional victory in Iraq.

It is, though, hard to figure John McCain these days. He argued that President Bush's tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, but he now supports them. He promises a balanced budget by the end of his first term, but his tax cut plan would add an estimated $4.2 trillion in debt over 10 years. He has responded to the economic crisis with an angry, populist message and a misguided, $300 billion proposal to buy up bad mortgages.

McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.

Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.

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McCain calls Obama a typical liberal politician. Granted, it's disappointing that Obama's mix of tax cuts for most people and increases for the wealthy would create an estimated $2.9 trillion in federal debt. He has made more promises on spending than McCain has. We wish one of these candidates had given good, hard specific information on how he would bring the federal budget into line. Neither one has.

We do, though, think Obama would govern as much more of a pragmatic centrist than many people expect.

We know first-hand that Obama seeks out and listens carefully and respectfully to people who disagree with him. He builds consensus. He was most effective in the Illinois legislature when he worked with Republicans on welfare, ethics and criminal justice reform.

He worked to expand the number of charter schools in Illinois--not popular with some Democratic constituencies.

He took up ethics reform in the U.S. Senate--not popular with Washington politicians.

His economic policy team is peppered with advisers who support free trade. He has been called a "University of Chicago Democrat"--a reference to the famed free-market Chicago school of economics, which puts faith in markets.

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Obama is deeply grounded in the best aspirations of this country, and we need to return to those aspirations. He has had the character and the will to achieve great things despite the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S.

He has risen with his honor, grace and civility intact. He has the intelligence to understand the grave economic and national security risks that face us, to listen to good advice and make careful decisions.

When Obama said at the 2004 Democratic Convention that we weren't a nation of red states and blue states, he spoke of union the way Abraham Lincoln did.

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation's most powerful office, he will prove it wasn't so audacious after all. We are proud to add Barack Obama's name to Lincoln's in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States.

"....America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama...."

Barack Obama

The Choice

CommentThe New YorkerOctober 13, 2008

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty.

The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe.

At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless.

Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate.

McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace.

The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

What Joe the Plumber Can't Fix

Washington Post ColumnistBy E. J. Dionne Jr.October 16, 2008

The moment of truth in last night's debate came when Bob Schieffer asked the candidates if they would be willing to repeat, face to face, some of the personal charges they have made against each other in their ads and on the trail.

At first, John McCain flinched. Instead of answering directly, he suggested, remarkably, that it was Barack Obama who was running the more negative campaign. Polls show that this is certainly not the impression of voters. They see McCain as the negative guy.

But eventually McCain launched the attack everyone was waiting for, referring to Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, the '60s radical with whom Obama served on a Chicago education board that also included Republican members. Obama calmly noted that his relationship with Ayers was limited and that Ayers would play no role in an Obama administration.

But McCain was wound up, and before he was done, he made the astonishing claim that some fraudulent voter registrations obtained by ACORN -- that's the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- constituted "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and were "maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." Gosh, I didn't know our democratic fabric was so frail.

Ayers, ACORN and Joe the Plumber were the stars of McCain's desperate effort in the third and final presidential debate to revive a candidacy that has been on the skids ever since the economic crisis hit. (Joe, whose last name is Wurzelbacher and who runs a plumbing business in Ohio, confronted Obama recently at a campaign stop because he didn't like the idea that Obama would raise his taxes. He's become a hero on some conservative Web sites.)

This trio of attacks almost certainly did McCain good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe's view that Obama is some kind of socialist. But it's unlikely that McCain helped himself much with the moderate and middle-class voters who have drifted away from him. He failed to rattle the ever-calm Obama. And it's hard to see that anything McCain said last night repaired the damage done to his campaign by the economic crisis and his own handling of it.

Going into the debate, McCain was in a kind of strategic gridlock. To make the campaign a contest once again, he must arouse new doubts about Obama. But by hammering Obama, McCain seems only to be undercutting his own image. This Catch-22 renders his task Herculean. McCain must get voters to see him as steadier, more positive and more likable -- even as he makes his assaults on Obama stick.

This will not be easy in the coming weeks, as last night's performance suggested. A New York Times-CBS News poll released on the eve of the debate found that McCain's favorable ratings had slipped badly since mid-September. Then, McCain was viewed favorably by 44 percent of respondents and unfavorably by 37 percent. Now, the balance is 36 percent positive and 41 percent negative. In the same period, Obama's net positive ratings have only risen.

The poll asked voters if their opinion of McCain had changed for the better or for the worse in "the past couple of weeks." Only 7 percent said their view had changed in a positive direction; 21 percent said it had moved in a negative direction. Nearly a quarter of those who said their view of McCain had worsened cited his attacks on Obama as the reason for their change of heart; a fifth mentioned his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate.

What's striking about the past month is that the great American middle has shifted Obama's way. Recent polls by The Post and ABC News, Gallup, and the Pew Research Center suggest that Obama's gains since mid-September have been especially large among whites, particularly white men, and also among independents and moderates. At this crucial juncture, the contours of the 2008 contest are remarkably similar to those of the 2006 midterm elections that ended with a Democratic victory. Strikingly -- and no doubt unintentionally -- McCain echoed the Democrats' 2006 campaign theme when he said that voters want the country to move in "a new direction." That's McCain's problem.

McCain tried hard last night to paint Obama as a big-spending liberal who hangs around with radicals. But ideology may matter less to voters this year than temperament, and in this downturn, conservatism may be even more suspect than liberalism. In assailing Obama from the right, McCain may only have deepened the problems he already has.

postchat@aol.com

Read more from E.J. Dionne on washingtonpost.com's political opinion blog, PostPartisan.

Congressman John Lewis

John Lewis Warns McCain: You're "Sowing The Seeds Of Hatred And Division"

Nicholas GrahamHuffingtonpost.comOctober 11, 2008

Georgia congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis, reacting to the increasingly incendiary atmosphere at McCain-Palin campaign rallies, condemned the GOP for using tactics that are creating a mood not unlike the one created by George Wallace, the former segregationist governor and presidential candidate. Lewis accused the Republicans of "sowing the seeds of hatred and division," and warned the McCain campaign that they are "playing with fire:"

"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign," Lewis said in a statement. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

The veteran Democrat even invoked one of the most divisive figures in recent U.S. history. "During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama," said Lewis.

He warned, "As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."

The McCain campaign reacted quickly to push back against Lewis' statement:

Congressman John Lewis' comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale. The notion that legitimate criticism of Senator Obama's record and positions could be compared to Governor George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign. I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track.

I call on Senator Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America.

The Obama campaign declined to compare McCain's campaign with that of Wallace's, but backed Lewis' warning against the "hateful rhetoric" being used at some McCain-Palin campaign rallies:

Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies. But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for President of the United States 'pals around with terrorists.' As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together. That is the kind of campaign Senator Obama will continue to run in the weeks ahead.

The criticism from Lewis is especially sharp considering McCain has called him one of the "wisest" men he knows, one whose advice he would seek should he win the presidency.

Palin’s Kind of Patriotism

October 8, 2008Op-Ed ColumnistNew York TimesBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes. I can understand someone saying we have no business in Iraq, but I can’t understand someone who advocates staying in Iraq until “victory” declaring that paying taxes to fund that is not patriotic.

How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?

We are in the middle of an economic perfect storm, and we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. People all over the world are hoarding cash, and no bank feels that it can fully trust anyone it is doing business with anywhere in the world. Did you notice that the government of Iceland just seized the country’s second-largest bank and today is begging Russia for a $5 billion loan to stave off “national bankruptcy.” What does that say? It tells you that financial globalization has gone so much farther and faster than regulatory institutions could govern it. Our crisis could bankrupt Iceland! Who knew?

And we have not yet even felt the full economic brunt here. I fear we may be at that moment just before the tsunami hits — when the birds take flight and the insects stop chirping because their acute senses can feel what is coming before humans can. At this moment, only good governance can save us. I am not sure that this crisis will end without every government in every major economy guaranteeing the creditworthiness of every financial institution it regulates. That may be the only way to get lending going again. Organizing something that big and complex will take some really smart governance and seasoned leadership.

Whether or not I agree with John McCain, he is of presidential timber. But putting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.

And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?

And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. Palin happens to be governor of the Saudi Arabia of America — Alaska — and the only energy expertise she has is the same as the king of Saudi Arabia’s. It’s about how the windfall profits from the oil in their respective kingdoms should be divided between the oil companies and the people.

At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. That’s not patriotic. Patriotic is offering a plan to build our economy — not by tax cuts or punching more holes in the ground, but by empowering more Americans to work in productive and innovative jobs. If Palin has that kind of a plan, I haven’t heard it.

John McCain: Economic Disaster

An enlightening "series" of videos , especially for the undecided

http://therealmccain.com/

Oct 03, 2008

John McCain had the nerve to go on Scarborough and joke that he’s “not a rich man.” That’s rich! Now, I know McCain can’t remember just how many homes he owns, and I know McCain thinks being rich means having at least $5million, but I had no idea McCain didn’t consider himself wealthy. I mean, [...]

Read more in the REAL McCain blog →

John McCain does not have the ability to fix this economic crisis. After declaring the fundamentals of the economy strong, he created a political circus in Washington last week by mucking up bailout negotiations; a deplorable stunt, considering he and his political cronies helped cause the current meltdown.

It was McCain and his economic adviser Phil Gramm who pushed for the deregulation that helped lead to the banking crisis, and it was McCain's crony Rick Davis who had deep lobbyist ties to Freddie Mac. Don't let others be fooled by McCain's economic grandstanding because the reality is his policies and principles will only exacerbate our financial hardships. That's why you must spread this video.

MUST SEE VIDEO BY REP. MARCY KAPTUR (D-OH-9)

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH-9) lays it on the line on the crisis

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/23/14159/5504/484/607684

McCain vs. Palin

Washington PostColumnistBy Ruth MarcusTuesday, September 30, 2008

Forget Joe Biden. I'd like to see John McCain debate Sarah Palin.

McCain's scorn for Barack Obama was on unrestrained display in Friday night's debate. How dare this impudent whippersnapper imagine he can be president, you could almost see McCain thinking. I'm the one who's racked up the frequent-flier miles to Waziristan! Henry Kissinger and I were BFFs when Obama was glued to "The Brady Bunch"! Listening to McCain debate was like a stroll down foreign policy memory lane: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. George Shultz, "our great secretary of state." Perestroika. SDI.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought the Cold War would never end.

"Back in 1983, when I was a brand-new United States congressman. . .," McCain reminisced. And, "I supported Nunn-Lugar back in the early 1990s." By the time McCain described how the Pakistan-Afghanistan border "has not been governed since the days of Alexander the Great," you were half-expecting that he was going to tell you about how he led the congressional delegation that met with Alexander.

All this looking back doesn't strike me as a politically smart tactic -- or is that strategy? McCain risked coming off as the crotchety uncle who insists on telling you the same war stories -- over and over, no matter how off-point they are. No voter looking into the financial abyss believes the most pressing budgetary problem is $3 million to study bear DNA.

And for McCain to open the debate by noting that Ted Kennedy was in the hospital -- a gracious touch, certainly, but reminding the audience about an ailing senior senator is not the optimal move for a 72-year-old cancer survivor seeking the presidency.

Which brings me to Palin, and my continuing -- no, make that deepening -- mystification over McCain's choice. I can understand how he views Obama as untested and unprepared.

I can't square that dismissive attitude with McCain's selection of Palin.

McCain's fundamental argument in pursuit of the presidency is that he has the background to do the job. He made this point again and again Friday night. "I've been involved, as I mentioned to you before, in virtually every major national security challenge we've faced in the last 20-some years. There are some advantages to experience, and knowledge, and judgment." Or, "The important thing is I visited Afghanistan and I traveled to Waziristan and I traveled to these places and I know what our security requirements are."

And so therefore I picked a running mate who didn't have a passport two years ago? Asked about that by Katie Couric, Palin explained that "I'm not one of those who maybe come from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduated college and their parents get them a passport and a backpack and say, 'Go off and travel the world.' "

Instead, Palin said, "the way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world."

This would be more reassuring if Palin had demonstrated more evidence of having read extensively about history or world affairs. Asked in an interview for PBS's Charlie Rose show last year ( http://www.charlierose.com/guests/sarah-palin) about her favorite authors, Palin cited C.S. Lewis -- "very, very deep" -- and Dr. George Sheehan, a now-deceased writer for Runner's World magazine whose columns Palin still keeps on hand.

"Very inspiring and very motivating," she said. "He was an athlete and I think so much of what you learn in athletics about competition and healthy living that he was really able to encapsulate, has stayed with me all these years."

Also, she got a Garfield desk calendar for Christmas 1987 that made a big impression.

McCain is a voracious reader of history. The day before the New Hampshire primary, I sat on his campaign bus listening to him hold forth about William Manchester on Douglas MacArthur.

And in his most recent book, "Hard Call," McCain explains why knowledge of history matters: "Great statesmen who have been praised for their ability to see around the corner of history knew their history before they looked beyond it, and they understood the forces that drove it in one direction or another." If there is evidence that Palin has that understanding, it is yet to emerge. Peering around the corner of history with Palin as vice president is a terrifying prospect.

marcusr@washpost.com

E. J. Dionne

McCain's Lost Chance

Obama Holds His Own on Foreign Policy

Washington PostColumnistBy E. J. Dionne Jr.Monday, September 29, 2008

September began as John McCain's month and ended as Barack Obama's. McCain's high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday's debate eliminated McCain's best chance to deliver a knockout blow to an opponent whose most important asset may be his capacity for self-correction.

McCain is supposed to own the foreign policy issue -- and he should have owned Friday's debate. During their respective primary battles, McCain was a better debater than Obama, who could be hesitant, wordy and thrown off his stride.

But the Obama who showed up at Ole Miss was sharper and more concise than the man who frequently lost debates against his Democratic foes. He was also resolutely calm in standing his ground against McCain, whose condescension became a major talking point after the debate. If Al Gore suffered from his sighs during the 2000 debates, McCain will be remembered for his supercilious repetition of seven variations on "Senator Obama doesn't understand."

This gave special power to Obama's peroration about McCain's "wrong" judgments on going to war in Iraq. McCain's dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.

McCain's derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie -- and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama. CNN's survey found that 59 percent of women rated Obama as having done better, with just 31 percent saying that of McCain.

An Obama adviser who was watching a "dial group" -- in which viewers turn a device to express their feelings about a debate's every moment -- said that whenever McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican's ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women.

But if the debate was indeed a tie -- and McCain certainly looked informed and engaged once the discussion moved from economics to foreign affairs -- this would count as a net gain for Obama. A foreign policy discussion afforded McCain his best opportunity to aggravate doubts about his foe. That opportunity is now gone.

As for the first 40 minutes devoted to the economic crisis, Obama was more forceful in addressing public anxieties. He used the occasion to tout his middle-class tax cut that a large share of the electorate doesn't even know he's proposing. Obama's campaign quickly went on the air with an ad noting that McCain did not once mention the words "middle class" during the discussion.

Thus ends a month that began with such promise for McCain. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate at the end of August created a fortnight of excitement among Republican loyalists who were less than enthusiastic about McCain. Some said Palin would also enhance his appeal to female voters and help him recast his candidacy as a maverick's crusade.

But it was a reckless choice. Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective. She is held in protective custody by a campaign that trusts her less and less. A few conservatives have suggested she should be dropped from the ticket.

Then came McCain's abrupt foray into Washington's negotiations over a Wall Street bailout bill. His showy call for postponing Friday's debate was serenely rebuffed by Obama, and McCain was forced to retreat. The candidate with 26 years of congressional experience lost a test of wills to an opponent with just four years on the national stage.

And when McCain intervened in the rescue package discussions, his position on the matter was muddy. This champion of bipartisanship briefly stood up for a House Republican minority that was battling against a bipartisan accord largely accepted by his Senate Republican colleagues, and then he pulled back. The McCain who had once allied with such liberals as Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold was suddenly flirting with an approach to the economic rescue that was recommended by Newt Gingrich.

The post-Labor Day period has thus brought the campaign to an unexpected point.

McCain, once the candidate of tested experience, must now battle the perception that he has become the riskier choice, a man too given to rash moves under pressure. Obama, whose very newness promised change but also raised doubts, has emerged as the cool and unruffled candidate who moves calmly but steadily forward. However one judges the first debate, it did nothing to block Obama's progress.

postchat@aol.com

Sarah Palin Family

Hanging With The Palins? Not for Me.

I still listen when Bill Clinton speaks, and this week the former president got off a few lines that really got me thinking.

Referring to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, Clinton said, "They're wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy [Palin's husband, Todd] does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy." "She's hot out there," Clinton said, because Americans can relate to her and her family.

Pardon me, Mr. President: Here's one American who has difficulty relating to the Palins.

I'm confident that I would get along with Sarah Palin if we found ourselves in the same company. I was taught good manners.

But that's not what Clinton meant.

He was suggesting that Americans identify with Sarah Palin.

Count me out.

It's not a question of elitism or snobbery. I'm in no position to look down my nose at anybody; nor do I want to.

Sarah Palin's values, her worldview and those things from which she apparently derives pleasure are what set us far apart. She obviously enjoys the adoring support of many people who believe she sees things their way.

Palin and I just don't see eye to eye.

For instance, I do not now have -- nor am I likely ever to have before departing this vale of tears -- the slightest interest in skinning a moose or in scarfing down a mooseburger. Knowing how to properly field dress a moose is, for Palin, evidently a source of pride. As is her love of mooseburgers.

I simply cannot relate to any of that.

Sarah Palin gets a gold star for being a hockey mom. I don't believe I know any hockey moms or at least any mothers who wittingly bear such a title.

But in my life and work, I've come to know and identify with single moms who successfully raise families. They are, in my book, the real deal; they deserve applause.

I also have great trouble identifying with the Palins when it comes to education.

Those of us in my generation who were fortunate enough to attend college had to work our butts off to get our degrees, and get them on time.

Some of us were the first in our families to continue education beyond high school. It was a financial struggle to enroll in college and remain there for four years.

We certainly didn't want to prolong the sacrifices that our families were making to keep us in school. The pursuit of a college education could not, in our case, turn into a career.

The degree was our goal, education was the basis for achieving it, and that was our focus -- except for parties on the weekend.

A number of us met our life partners on campus. Some of us went on to become commissioned officers in the armed forces. A large number pursued graduate and professional degrees.

Relate to Sarah and Todd Palin?

She attended five colleges over a six-year span before graduating from the University of Idaho. Todd, a part-time oil production operator and summertime commercial fisherman, doesn't have a college degree.

He registered to vote in 1989, when he was 25 years old, and for seven years was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party -- a political party that, among its objectives, advocates a vote on Alaska becoming a separate nation.

Again, to the best of my knowledge, there are no secessionists in my circle.

I do know that I don't much care for the government messing around with our families, advocating abstinence only for children -- as does Gov. Palin and, perhaps, people who identify with her.

I do believe in age-appropriate sex education and that teenagers should be informed about the proper use of birth control. And that a girl who finds herself unexpectedly impregnated by an unemployed high school dropout ought to have some choice other than becoming a shotgun bride.

I don't particularly admire heads of the executive branch who try to skirt legitimate legislative inquiries into their official conduct. And I don't think much of executives who allow their subordinates to dishonor subpoenas for sworn testimony. I can't relate to that kind of conduct.

I am the spouse of someone who managed a government enterprise that had more than 70,000 employees. To the best of my recollection, I visited her office only two or three times. I was there for the first and last days on the job, and maybe one or two in between during her three-year tenure.

So I have a tough time identifying with Todd Palin, who hangs out in his wife's office, meddling in Alaska government business and using his "first gentleman" status to settle personal beefs. Some may think that's cute. I think he's riding on his wife's coattails.

If Hillary Clinton won the White House, would Bill hang out there, too?

Hmm. Maybe that's why Bill likes Todd.

Ol' prez can relate to that.

kingc@washpost.com

The Right Soapbox for McCain

Washington PostSeptember 24, 2008By Colbert King

What is John McCain going to do in Washington this week? The Senate banking committee, led by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), has the lead in fashioning legislation to enable a bailout of the financial industry.

McCain is not a member of that committee.

He serves on the armed services committee, the commerce committee and committee on Indian affairs. Those committees do not have oversight of the financial markets nor responsibility for putting together a rescue package.

Banking committee members -- Republicans and Democrats -- don't need to check with the GOP presidential nominee before they act. Nor should they. After all, McCain has already admitted that he needs to get up to speed on the economy. He'll have plenty of time to express himself once a bill is reported out of committee.

The administration is engaged in discussions with the appropriate legislative leaders of both parties and on both sides of the Capitol. That's where the deliberations belong.

The American people, not his fellow senators, need to hear from John McCain about what thinks about this financial crisis and about our national security. And he should share his views in a face-to-face exchange with his Democratic opponent. The presidential debate scheduled for Friday night in Mississippi gives McCain that opportunity. That's where he belongs.

Obama holds a young boy

Subject: Tell Barack you've got his back

moveon.com

Hi,

We did it. We won. Doesn't it feel AMAZING?

Now, let's send Barack the biggest congratulations card ever sent. Let him know we've got his back as we begin the fight to restore our country together.